Walk a mile in the shoes of your decision before that decision becomes your path,  keeping in mind that so many of your dreams are waiting to be realized. Don't put limits on yourself. Reach for your goal - wish upon a star - but don't ever forget that you are unique and special and deserve more than to be second best in any part of your journey.

Choices

By Beverlee Blampied (c) 

You can stand, with ease

At the edge of the world

And grab hold of a star

Taking the time to now find

The meaning, the centre, the freedom

Of  your own universe

Becoming the star of your own world

And no longer second best in someone else's

The Empty Glass 

She reached home and was again disappointed to find the place empty. She quickly moved from room to room, turning on every light and leaving them on. She entered the bedroom and plopped herself down on the bed. She picked up the phone and dialed his private office number. It was just past 9:30 p.m.  There was no answer. She let the phone ring 10 times, hung up, then dialed again. After 10 more rings and no message option, she gave up, went downstairs to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine which she drank on her way back  upstairs. She placed the empty glass on the night table, sat back against the fluffy pillows and reflected. She had no proof that her husband was having an affair. She had no hard evidence. She had nothing but a lot of over-hasty assumptions and conclusions to back up her unwarranted suspicions. He had done nothing - was doing nothing. She was the one making herself miserable with her instinctive feelings and random circumstantial evidence.

The phone rang beside her and she picked it up, feeling strangely groggy. "Hello"

His voice was soft and mellow - "Hi, sweetheart, did I wake you?"

"I must have dozed off", she said, clearing her throat, her eyes turning away from the bright glare of the overhead light.

"I'm sorry, Hon", he said, "I just wanted to let you know that I'm on my way home".

"Where are you?", she asked.

"Where do you think I am?", he said, exasperated - "I'm at the office".

"I called you", she said, looking at the clock, "about a half hour ago." She sat up.

"You did?", he asked - "not here".

"Yes" she said, "there. I let the phone ring ten times, then I hung up and called again".

"Well, it didn't ring - oh, damn, just a minute - stupid me", he said - "I turned it off this afternoon so I wouldn't be distracted, then I guess I forgot about it.  Sorry about that."

"No harm done", she said, a tear falling the length of her cheek. "See you soon"

She turned slowly, picked up the empty wine glass and angrily threw it across the room. Lost in confusion and encircled by fear, she watched the glass become tiny shards as it hit the wall, shattering like the empty fragments of her shattered heart.

Parting At Dawn

By Beverlee Blampied (c) 

Their parting at dawn engulfed her
In dark, grey clouds of sorrow
Encompassing her final acceptance
That there would be no more tomorrows
With the death of her dreams
And hurt pulling at her heart
She now asked herself why 
She'd ever allowed the affair to start
As she could now clearly see
That their brief stolen moments
Had brought her only heartache
With nothing but hurt to gain
And that all the  lamenting 
Of the 'should-haves' and 'could-haves'
Would never let their love sustain
Secrets and lies had accumulated heavily
Bringing with them too high a cost
And she - alone - was left to pay
The price for all she had lost
Now, in an attempt
To control her fluttering sanity
She desperately needed to find
A cool, private place way deep down
In the shadows of her tormented mind
Where, forever, she would never again
Feel the ache of her humiliating pain
As it had now become abundantly clear
Leaving her sadly haunted
That he had chosen to love her
For only as long as he wanted.

Confusion

They kissed under the billions of twinkling stars. Then they kissed again, longer and harder. But that was it. There they stood, two people falling in love, but separated by their marriages, their families, and especially their children, still living at home. He eventually drove her to her car, but didn't kiss her when she got out of his, though, God, she wanted him to.

She entered the house and found her husband was sleeping. She had hoped that she wasn't going to have to make up a story, but she needn't have worried. She undressed quickly and when she was under the sheets, she looked into his face. To her surprise, she didn't feel any guilt about what had happened - but she did have an interesting thought. She wondered if he would even notice anything different about her in the morning - would he notice that while he slept, she'd become happy.

With those thoughts, she fell asleep peacefully, but with the bright sunlight filtering through the bedroom window, she awoke the next morning consumed with the reality of her situation and, confused and conflicted with twisted emotions, she realized that what had seemed like a good idea at the time - when she had entered into this out-of-marriage relationship - was now beginning to play a tug of war with her core beliefs. Her dignity and integrity were in conflict with her actions. It was hard for her to believe that she had allowed herself to be in this space. She had convinced herself that she would be able to keep her life - herself - separate in both relationships. She had come to this division in her marriage, she supposed, because the events of the past few months had deepened her nagging sense of emptiness within the marriage. Her mind and feelings had been silent for quite a few years now. What she presented on the outside was not real - she was disappearing at a very fast rate and her soul was cold and lonely. This new relationship awakened her, offering her the chance to live in the moment, to experience long-lost emotions, giving her the daily pleasure of following her heart.

But the happiness of their dinner date the previous evening was now lost with the morning light, and her mind was beginning to struggle with love and reality and faith and the delusions of good and evil, making her more acutely aware that perhaps this clandestine relationship, and her decision to be a part of it, could well be an emotionally dangerous liaison, leading to only tragic results.

Forced Choices

He never did call from Montreal and, as far as she could tell, he never sneaked back into their apartment, while she was away, to pick up any of his things either. She rattled around the place, eating microwave dinners from his plates, with his forks, in front of his TV- he'd made her give away most of her things when they had moved in together - not his style, he'd said. She had begun to feel like she was living a borrowed life. She knew that one day he'd come back to collect it all and she would be left with nothing. She started browsing through Kijiji for small, furnished basement apartments that she could afford on her salary, but she couldn't bring herself to visit any of them. Before long, ads for back-to-school sales appeared in the paper and she realized that it had been six weeks since she had seen him. She should pack his things, she told herself - to save him the trouble when he finally came to retrieve them. She brought a bunch of boxes home from the liquor store and started with the clothes in his dresser. It was too painful and she gave up before she had filled a single box.

She welcomed the beginning of the school year when it came - not that she was particularly prepared for it, after all the moping around that she had done all summer. She was teaching Grade 8 Geography for the first time. She had to pull a series of all-nighters to improve her lesson plans. The advantage of  this busyness, though, was that it gave her less time to think about him, and subsequently she volunteered to help with the school's fall pageant and then offered to help in the planning of a student field trip. She spent as little time in the apartment as possible.

During her fourth week back at school she arrived home one evening to find the apartment lights on. The place smelled of bleach and there were vacuum tread marks on the living room carpet. All the dirty dishes she had accumulated had been washed and stacked in the drainer by the kitchen sink. She stood there - afraid to move. She heard the sound of the toilet flushing and the bathroom door opening. He stepped out wearing one of his body-fitting tee shirts. He paused a minute when he saw her and then acted like he had never left.  He said he was thinking of making her favorite Chicken Cacciatore for supper and asked her if she'd like to have a salad with it. She stared at him, her purse still in her hand. He made his way past her into the kitchen, and asked her how her day at school had been, then began pulling the makings of supper out of the newly filled fridge. He asked her to get a can of stewed tomatoes out of the cupboard and open it. She crossed the kitchen, hung her purse on the chair back and sat at the table unsteadily. "Well", he said, "are you just going to sit there"? She said nothing. He shrugged and continued preparing supper, She listened to him attempt to fill the void between them with idle chit-chat. He said that his car had developed a rattle on his trip home and that he would be taking it in for servicing. He said his hair needed a cut and he was going to go tomorrow to get it done. After about ten minutes of this, she got up and went into the bedroom.

She'd waited so long to have him back that she'd convinced herself that anything would be worth the chance at a fresh start, even a little swallowed pride. Whenever she had imagined his return, she had envisioned him managing to show a little contrition, a tiny bit of remorse and so the sordid events of the preceding months would not have to be dwelt on, but they wouldn't be completely ignored either. But now that he was actually here, it was as if she hadn't even existed for him while they were apart. She'd been frozen out of time until he had decided to reappear and she could be reheated like one of his microwave dinners. When he came to tell her that supper was ready, she had her bags packed. "What are you doing?" he asked, the first real look of concern creeping across his face.

She found one of the empty liquor store boxes at the back of their shared closet and took it with her to the spare bedroom. "This isn't the way it works", she said. "We don't just pick up where we left off by pretending nothing happened". "Where are you going to go?" he demanded. She continued packing all the things that she needed for school - her texts, her notes - "I don't know yet", she said.

He could have stopped her anytime, simply by offering her an apology - even a half-hearted one would have done the job. But it never occurred to him. And she was damned if she was going to beg for one.

She went to get her phone from her purse and called herself a taxi. Before she could give the dispatcher the apartment number he grabbed her cell phone out of her hand and disconnected the call. "I just got home" he said, his voice trembling with anger, but when she didn't cringe, he softened his voice and tried to bargain with her. "At least stay for supper and then we can talk".

It took her only three trips to get her things down to the now waiting taxi. He kept trying to convince her to stop acting like a drama queen and to think things through.

By her third trip, the door to his apartment was chained shut and her final load was waiting for her in the hallway.