The Love Of Each Other’s Lives [FICTOID]

He was eighty-six, she was twenty-seven.

They knew they were soul mates the moment they met, but they also recognized the impossibility of their situation.

They had obligations.  Both were married -- to someone else. 

Both had families.

No matter that each could scarcely breathe in the other’s presence, each had to behave, not out of any sense of righteous propriety, but the knowledge they could not hurt others who loved and depended on them.

It was, to put it very mildly, irritating.

It’s like trying to describe what a sixth finger feels like to someone who has only five, she thought.

She didn’t have six fingers, but nonetheless it proved an apt analogy.

They met at a ceiling fan shop, he to get a replacement part, she to find one for her younger child’s bedroom.

They talked -- innocently though, no one could accuse them of improper behavior -- and quickly realized each was the perfect match they’d sought all their lives.

Still…nothing they could do about it.

Oh, they found ways of meeting in public -- always in a prim and proper manner no one could object to (and besides, a wrinkled old hairless coot with liver spots bedding a trim young mother who scarcely looked as if she’d born three children?  Yuck!  Let’s not dwell on that image).

They talked of many things -- he told dumb jokes like “You can tune a piano but you can’t tuna fish” that were so dumb she couldn’t help laughing, and while they never so much as touched hands, much less kiss, they enjoyed an intimacy few others ever experienced.

Tragically, death separated them:  Hers.

She was killed in a traffic accident; he didn’t learn about it until two days after her funeral.

Not that he could have gone, of course, but it would have been nice to have known.

He spent his own last days with his wife, patiently waiting at her nursing home bedside until she died.

And once she did, he passed away a few days later, his duty fulfilled.

© Buzz Dixon