He had just finished reading a novella
about a woman who, at fifty, left her
husband and he knew that if his late
wife who died at forty-nine had lived,
she would have left him at fifty, also.
They were such babies when they met
and married eight years later in their
early twenties. They grew and were
good at that growing, but they didn’t
grow together; he wished she had lived
so that, at fifty, she could do what
she had planned on doing which was to
leave him; it would break his heart
in a different way from which it was
broken, but at least this time, she
would be alive.