Solace

A Story by Deirdre

The man broke away from the crowd, stumbling into the middle of the street. He gave one last look at the mass of people on the sidewalk, and a glance at the coffin being hoisted up the street by six men before turning around and going in the opposite direction. He could not bear it. He couldn’t stand to be at her funeral. He couldn’t stand there looking into the eyes of her husband and her children watching their tears and at the same time cry for what he had lost. Surely they had lost more? Their mother, their wife. No, he told himself. He had lost so much more. He had lost the love of his life, his soul mate, but still he couldn’t stand there and look on and act as if was only a friend, not when there was so much more to the story.

They had been seeing each other for more than a year. All they had were stolen evenings and secret weekends. They would meet at an old café where they knew no one would recognize them. They had come close to being discovered, but they had always been able to make up some sort of excuse, some lie to keep their love hidden. Their lies had varied from the outrageous to the bland, but they had never been caught. They had felt like school children the way they had been running around meeting each other. There had been so much passion, vigor, and love in their life that they could never dream of going back to the way things used to be. Before they had started their affair she had been stuck in a less than passionate marriage to a man that he was best friends with. He lived alone, running through a string of random one night stands with the kinds of girls you meet in dark alleyways. They were both unhappy with their lives, that it seemed almost natural that they would find solace in each others arms.

They had had 12 long months with each other when she started getting sick. At first it had only been a cough and nothing more, but then it increased to something worse. She began to cough up blood, and had lost a tremendous amount of weight in only a short span of time. She could barely make it through the day without having to retire to her bed. Their time together became shorter and shorter, and it was harder for them to steal away for a few hours without anyone noticing because she was so weak that she had to stay at home. Then, they couldn’t see each other at all. Her doctor feared spreading the disease and so she became quarantined and only her family was allowed to see her for a certain amount of time. And then one day she died in her sleep. The doctors had said that she went peacefully and that she hadn’t been in any pain. He went out that night and had gotten drunk off a bottle of whiskey, which he had thrown at the window of the café they had visited.

Now he was walking away from her funeral with tears flowing freely down his face. He was destined to be alone, he swore that he would never love again, and he told himself that he would never forget his beautiful lover, the woman he had risked everything to have.

In the years that passed the man never did forget her. He lived alone and reverted back to his old life, the life he had before he knew her. Her husband had remarried 4 years after her passing, and had never learned of her betrayal. No one had known of their secret affair, and no one ever would.