I Hope You Dance

It was a fall morning, much like yesterday and the day before. The breeze blew with the gentlest ease, and the sound it made blowing through the leaves would have been a combination of beauty and peacefulness on any other day. The colors of red, gold, and orange swirled around our feet and made a carpet of color on the grass around us.

The sound of a voice and the sniffles around me seems to thunder in my head even though not a word being said registers in my mind. I look around me with a feeling of desperation to just be able to wake up from this terrible nightmare and be able to turn and run away. The people standing on both sides of me are all familiar to me, but their presence doesn't bring me the comfort that it normally does. Each person stands looking forward with the same blank expression as I am sure is on my face. I try hard to understand the feeling inside me. It is a combination of numbness and bone-crushing agony all at once, as if I have to concentrate to just breathe in and out. The cool air on my cheeks brings me back to this place that I stand, but the numbness inside me refuses to register the cold.

I feel the gentle movement of the object in my arms and it startles me for a second as I look down toward it. How could this be happening? How will I ever get through this and be the man I need to be not only for myself but also for her? I wipe the tear from my eye before it falls upon her cheek, the cheek of the only thing left in this world that is a part of my loss, the only piece of my Katie that is left, the one thing that Katie had wanted more than life itself. And because of it, her life is over. I hate this day, this day in November. It is November fourteenth to be exact, and saying the date to myself reminds me that it would be a day forever in my mind, the day that I would give a hundred days to have it erased, the day that I am no longer the person I was or thought I would always be, the day I say my forever goodbye to Katie.

by Tina Floyd

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