Arthur sat in the worn leather armchair by the window, the one that still held the faint indentation of her shape, even though the cushions had been replaced twice. Outside, the autumn leaves were turning gold and brittle, a cycle he had watched forty-five times since the last time she saw it.
He looked down at his hands. They were wrinkled now, spotted with age, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. They were stranger’s hands. The last time Sarah had held them, they were smooth, strong, and wearing a wedding band that hadn’t yet gathered a single scratch.
Today was the anniversary. Not of her death, but of the realization.
It had hit him this morning while brewing coffee. He was seventy-two years old. They had met when he was twenty-three. They had married at twenty-four. She was gone by twenty-seven.
Four years. That was the sum total of their “forever.”
He did the mental calculations, the cruel accounting of his life. He had lived forty-five years without her.
The realization was a physical weight in the center of his chest. Time was never fair to us. It was a thief that had distracted them with a dazzling, blinding joy for a fleeting moment, only to rob them of the future while they weren’t looking.
He remembered those four years. They felt less like a period of time and more like an explosion. It was a frantic, breathless happiness. They had loved each other with an intensity that felt almost desperate, as if some deep, subconscious part of their souls knew they were on a deadline. They finished each other’s sentences; they dreamed the same dreams. It felt less like falling in love and more like a reunion with someone he had always known.
And then, a slick road on a rainy Tuesday night ended the sentence mid-word.
For the first decade, Arthur was just treading water in an ocean of grief. People told him he was young, that he would “move on.” They didn’t understand. You don’t move on from your soul’s mirror. You just learn to live in a shattered room.
He had lived a decent life since then. He had a career, good friends, nieces and nephews he adored. But he walked through it all feeling like a ghost haunting his own existence. He was present, but not accounted for.
He picked up the small, silver frame on the side table. It was the only photo he kept out anymore. The two of them on a beach, laughing, soaked by a rogue wave. They looked ridiculously young. They looked immortal.
He ran his thumb over the glass above her face. The bitterness of the math stung his eyes. It was an injustice that no amount of therapy or time could fix.
“The ledger is unbalanced, Sarah,” he whispered to the empty room. “I will spend more years missing you than i got to spend with you“. The scale was tipped so heavily toward absence that it felt like the universe had made a mistake in its calculations.
But as the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the floorboards, the bitterness began to recede, replaced by a strange, deep sense of certainty.
He was nearing the end of his own timeline now. The doctor had told him his heart was tired. He wasn’t afraid. In fact, he felt a growing sense of anticipation, like standing in a train station waiting for an arrival he had known was coming for half a century.
He realized that this life—this long, lonely stretch of forty-five years—was just the waiting room. The four years they had shared wasn’t the whole story; it was just the prologue.
He closed his eyes, letting the memories of her laugh wash over him, louder now than the silence of the house. He knew, with a conviction that settled deep in his bones, that what they had couldn’t be contained by a single lifespan.
“Go ahead, time. Take what you want from this one,” he whispered into the twilight, a peaceful smile touching his lips for the first time in years. “It doesn’t matter. Because I will look for you in every lifetime that follows this one“.
And next time, he vowed, he would make sure the math was in their favor.
