Kristen Elizabeth Stories

You surprised me.  Ice-cream.  We would finish this weekend with ice-cream.  Our 16-year-old daughter visiting her grandparents left us alone together.  What do I say to you?  It’s been so many years.  You lied to me all those years ago.  I suppose I lied to you, too.  Maybe we didn’t know we were lying to each other … even to ourselves, but after twenty-seven years it’s easy to see how we deceived each other and ourselves into believing we were a certain kind of a person that we weren’t and never would be.  I held our lifeless baby girl twenty-three years ago and you left me.  I know you didn’t really leave me, but it felt like you did.  You turned your heart so far inward and built a massive stone fortress around it that even I couldn’t break through!  But I suppose I did the very same thing.  Sometimes, I wonder if there is just too much pain to keep going … too much pain to, all these years later, try to build something beautiful together.  But you surprised me.  You looked in my eyes and saw me for a moment in time and asked if you could take me out for ice-cream.  I love ice-cream.  Ice-cream is so happy.  I got soft vanilla ice-cream with chocolate sprinkles in a cone, and you got a hot fudge sundae in a dish.  My ice-cream immediately started melting in the hot, humid summer air.  The melting ice-cream made my hands become ever so sticky!  You hate sticky hands. You surprised me.  You took my hand in yours and we walked down that ocean path across from Dunkin Donuts.  There are wildflowers, daisies, and ocean roses.  You picked me a daisy and ever so gently put it in the clip in my hair.  Daisies are my favorite flower.  You remember.  You surprised me.  I didn’t think you remembered.  How long will this last?  Will you leave me again?  For how many years this time?  But for this moment in time, you are with me … a daisy in my hair, my sticky hand in yours and ice-cream.  And for this moment in time that is more than enough.