Tuesday's Tale

This is, I promise, a fiction.

It was times of quiet like this that hit him hardest. Times when life conspired to give him time to think. Times when there were no outside distractions to take his mind off the shit that had become his life.

She had taken the kids. She had taken the house. She had taken everything he owned. And left him with nothing.

Once upon a time they had been happy. Two young kids with nothing but their passion for each other and a small apartment. Working together to make a life for themselves. Working all day. Making love all night. That's where they started.

But the kids came and the house came and the cars and the bills came and soon they were not so much the young kids in love but the young couple down the street that seemed to be fighting all the time. You could hear the yelling down the block on warm summer nights when the windows were open and the curtains gently lapped at the windowsill.

These quiet times were the worst. He really missed his kids. Thinking of them made his chest hurt so much he could barely breathe. He wanted them back. He plotted all the ways he would get them back. How he would win them back in a custody battle. All he needed to do was to let the judge know how much he loved his kids. He wanted to play with them and watch them grow and play catch and dolls and all the other things those two great little kids loved to do. At least he was beyond the point where she hurt so much - thinking of her didn't rip at his gut like it did at first. But all of it still hurt.

He was living in his friend's house. In a rented room in the attic. And there was a window that opened and let him out on the roof. That's where he was now. Laying back on the roof looking up into an empty sky and contemplating how long it would take him to hit the ground and wondering if it would hurt if he did it and wondering if it would hurt anyone if he did it and then he thought of his kids and the urge went away as quickly as it had snuck up on him.

He knew that wasn't the answer. That stepping off the roof would never be the answer.
He climbed in through the window and closed it behind him. As he drew the curtains back over the window, he realized he had just experienced the ultimate irony. He had been imagining how he would rescue his kids from her, how he would get them back and build his life all over again and in the process, his kids had rescued him.

And the funny thing was, they would never, ever know.

Peace.