Creative Musings of Ledia Runnels

I sit alone and stare at nothing, from the lavish, brocade couch that Mike bought just because I wanted it…

so different from telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.

 An image plays across my mind of the day we traveled back to a place where we had once lived as a happy family.

The yellow haze hanging in the air that day always bothered me.

My teenage son drove the red Mustang, speeding south past the imposing statue of Sam Houston that now loomed in the distance off highway 45. As we approached the Woodlands Mall, I looked out from the backseat and that was when I noticed the dirty sky.

The songs the children and I sang earlier that day, keeping time with the music from the CD player, dried up when we left Dallas, replaced by an empty sensation that squirmed like a worm inside my chest and grew to the size of a viper at the exit to the apartment I rented in advance from an online site.

That yellow haze resembled the dust storms from my childhood in West Texas that filled the air and left piles of grit lying on the window sills. But there aren’t any dust storms in East Central Texas so I never knew if the sky that day really turned yellow or my mind just played tricks on me…

Now as I sit alone two images flash in juxtaposition across my mind. The first happened four days after Mike and I married and I prepared to leave on a jet plane that would take me to the tiny Aleutian Island of Adak, Alaska for a one year tour of duty in the United States Navy. The night before I flew north, we sat in the front seat of the blue Regal…

that Mike bought because he thought it would impress me

…feeling miserable to the dulcet strains of England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “We’ll never have to say goodbye again.” It’s still the song that makes me remember how much in love we were.

So, after checking my luggage at Intercontinental Airport, we snuggled in a restaurant lounge talking about our brief honeymoon in a hotel on Corpus Christi beach–Texas, overlooking the silver-gray waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh what a night!

And the spectacular house we wanted to build someday in the Colorado Rockies. I clutched the ticket that would take me away while Mike gently held me, my tear-streaked-face dampening his big shoulder.

Later, walking toward the boarding gate I stopped to wave one last goodbye before taking the triple-leg flight from Houston to Seattle to Anchorage to Adak, Alaska. I turned to see Mike standing a short distance back.

Tears glistened in his eyes.

I wanted to run and comfort him, but the boarding call had gone out and I couldn’t miss this flight. So I smiled sweetly and blew him a kiss instead.

The navy frowns heavily on deserters.

The second image, synchronized with the first, had Mike standing alone in the front yard beside the moving van that held all mine and the children’s belongings. Except for what we carried in our suitcases stuffed inside the red car’s trunk partly because I never wanted to move from Texas to Pennsylvania in the first place.

And to clinch the deal breaker, we had spent the last six months in Tobyhanna, PA with just me and the kids shoveling snow layered waist deep to my 5’ 2” frame and sliding between ice walls that jutted toward foggy skies on either side of the gravel driveway. I was angry!

But I had told him to leave since he stopped listening to me when I made him feel that he couldn’t do anything right after he did that thing that crushed my heart so long ago–even though he told me he was sorry.

I rise from the beloved couch as a terrible realization slams into my conscience–The day I drove away from the chocolate three-story chalet in Pennsylvania, as fast as I safely could on the PA two-lane residential, I hadn’t looked back to wave goodbye.

Or see if Mike had tears glistening in his eyes.

In the Mustang, my daughter’s cheerful voice chirped from the passenger front seat, sounding garish and out-of-place in its sweetness. “Mom, we’re home!” she sang out to me hunched in the backseat feeling miserable instead of happy.

A knot clenched in my throat as hot tears welled up in my eyes. I quickly blinked them back.

Isn’t this what I wanted, to return to the place we were happy? But all I could reply was “Are we really?” because, truth be told, home no longer felt like home and I really hated how much that tainted, yellow sky hurt my eyes.

He used to call me his queen. I wonder if he could ever feel this way again.

And the truth is… I miss him terribly.

Copyright 2012 by Ledia Runnels

WE’LL NEVER HAVE TO SAY GOODBYE AGAIN

(Jeffrey Comanor) England Dan & John Ford Coley – 1978

(Find the song on Youtube here:}

Turn on the radio We’ll play it way down low

There’s a tear in your eye That’s reflecting the fire’s glow

and I wish the night would never end

The sun ain’t gonna be my friend

Lying here waiting and wishing I knew when

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

You must leave I know you will

I won’t let you go until

you show me some secret for making this time stand still

And somewhere, sometime from now

Together again somehow

All of the waiting will seem like a moment and then

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

The whole night

afraid to see the light

And the whole day cryin’

Wishin’ I knew when

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

And I wish the night would never end

The sun ain’t gonna be my friend

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

We’ll never have to say goodbye again

Links:

The image above came from “Corpus Christi Beach Information” http://visitcorpuschristitx.org/Corpus_Christi_Beaches.cfm