Bohemia Village Voice  Bohemia Village Voice

For bohemians everywhere

Catherine Lewis

Waiting

I may not have met you yet but your fingerprints are all over my life. Your name is in my every conversation, your presence is in my home and my love for you, a stranger, is sweetly spiralling as the minutes tick by.
Change no longer looms as an unappetising slice of future. This change, the biggest of all, bringing a carnival of colour and possibility flashing into my life, is wanted more than any snug routine ever was. I just didn’t know that until now.
It was entirely possible my life could have gone on in that safe, weekly, Monday meat-and-two-veg way. I knew what to expect and when to expect it. I was routinely happy. I was routinely in love, laughing, talking, eating, sleeping, listening and watching minutes tick by, seven days a week.
Now I’m in love, laughing, talking, eating, sleeping, listening, watching and waiting for the time when that page is turned and a new story, better than any five-starred foray into fiction, begins.
Unlike so many chameleon changes, there is no secret lurking in the timing. No late night phone call, the echoing ring so tea-and-scones ordinary in daylight, more chilling than the climax of a nightmare in the dark; no sudden lurching from one era to the next, no leap into the unknown when you haven’t got it in the diary, no regretting something that can now never be changed.
No, the days to this date are falling faster than the autumn leaves of late October, faster than a birthday when you’ve reached the age when ‘Happy’ merely mocks.
My Valentine will come early next year, but really it’s already here, as close to my heart as could be. The glow and gift-giving of Christmas will frolic like fireflies before fading into New Year’s fireworks and Olympic countdowns and on into February’s icy bleakness and misty mugs of hot chocolate.
This month of melting red hearts and ancient clichés stumbling over jagged engagement rings will be the biggest of my life. The first day of yours will be the last of the one I know, and then we’ll be busy building a new one together. I’ll add to my repertoire of daughter, granddaughter, sister, friend, aunt, lover and wife the most monumental, maddening and magical of all – mother.

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