Growing Old.

She sits alone, her thoughts for company. Looking out into the garden. They've all grown up and left home now, once where laughter echoed now only a clock on the mantel sits patiently tick tick tick. She looks down at her hands in her lap and doesn't recognise them anymore they belong to someone else, eyes close briefly or was it longer? She cannot tell. Men once
Admired her figure she liked the glances and smiles. Now nobody sees her. Grandchildren come and visit sometimes and feels alive with stories of "when I was younger" and "when I met your grandfather" but those visits don't happen as much anymore. Loneliness. To be alone where the silence
Makes her want to scream.
She misses him and for those few moments when she wakes in the morning before the realisation he's gone arrives. Those precious moments when he hadn't died he's making a cup of tea, then her heart drops. It's been 18 years but misses him no less. Time doesn't heal not when you love someone as completely and entirely.
She doesn't think anybody knows that she kept his favourite cardigan and on days when nobody even calls on the phone she goes up to bed and lays down cuddling it as if it were him. She smiles in a sad way. Talking to him as they'd done for years. Never once thinking either would be taken from the other.
She misses him so!