Widow's Walk

I just sat at the Widow’s Walk and waited for my husband to come back to me.

Think of the lonely paths worn by many footsteps that lead to the sea. Grieving widows walk to the water to look for and long for their husbands lost at sea, beating down the grass into a row of sorrow. The Widow’s Walk is a sacred place symbolic of lost love and tinged with loneliness.

Today, my husband asked that we go to the video game store. We walked up and down the mall because all the stores had moved or been replaced, and we couldn’t find the video game store. We found a mall security agent at the far end of the mall, and he informed us that we had missed the only video game store; it was all the way at the opposite end, where we had started.

Conveniently, there was a comfy bench outside the game store. I sat with the other women while our husbands and boyfriends went into the sea. We waited and we hoped and we prayed that one day they’d return.

I broke the code. Instead of grieving as sisters in our solitude, I marched into the store, stood over my husband crouching to look at the bottom row, and growled, “Hello?”

He said, “I’m looking for a third game.”

I turned to stomp away, and he said to my back, “I’m almost finished.”

The agony of a video game widow, I feel so abandoned and neglected as I sit in wait for him when he goes to places I won’t follow. I moan and sigh, I check the time, I watch the sun sink lower into the mall skylights. I wait. I wait in the sacred place, hoping he’ll return.