Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
How could it be that two so young could be so in tune to each other? I often wondered that about Danijela and I. How we seemed to know what the other was thinking before we had even spoke, or how we would finish each other's sentences as if we were of one consciousness. It seemed always to be like that though, and maybe that in itself is what drew us to each other from those very first days.
My Mama once said she believed Danijela and I to both be old souls. She would say that watching us together seemed only to convince her more that we must have been married many times before. In those few years she was alive after Danijela's death, she realized how lost I was without her, without our babies, and she tried to ease my grief by reassuring me that we would be together again. She was so sure of it, and even when it came time for her to say her final good-byes as she lay close to death herself, she made a point of reminding me of it. Even if I couldn't see it then, I do see it now.
Of course, I wasn't thinking of any of this in those early years we were together, we were so busy discovering who we were and planning the lifetime we were sure we would have together. We had so many plans for our lives and for those of the children we would one day have. It all seemed so perfect, we would settle close to our parents, so our children could know the joy of spending time with their grandparents as we both had. We both agreed that they would aways be surrounded by the love of not just aunts and uncles, but their cousins, and a community who might as well be family. People who knew them, and who they knew, people they could go to for anything, at anytime.
For too many years I blamed God for robbing Danijela and I of this life together, I hated him for stealing away our children before they had a chance to know the joys of this world. Looking back on what little time we had now, I realize that I had misplaced my anger, that I had short-changed all the good Danijela and I had given our children by focusing only on the bad. Far worse though was my throwing away all the time Danijela and I had shared between us and only living for those last few hours that led up to her death. If Mama was right, if this was just one in a series of times we were together and more are to come, what right do I have to decide that nothing but those last few hours have meaning? How is that fair to Danijela? How is that fair to our children?
From the moment we met it seemed that Danijela and I had begun making plans for the future we would share together, why should that change for me now? For the first time in far too long I can look toward what will one day come again, knowing in my heart that in our next life, we will once more find each other, and we will again be man and wife as we are destined to be.
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