Nancy Bartholomew

She has the most incredibly blue eyes.  She stares up at me from behind her oversized eyeglasses and her eyebrows shoot up into twin peaks of shocked recognition.

"It's the one...you are...I knew..." she is muttering.

It is clear- she is thinking "Do I dare believe my eyes? Is it really her?"

I have watched Edith do this time after time, for weeks.  Each time she does it, she selects a different face in the sea of unknown strangers surrounding her.

And each time, if the even meet her eyes, their response is the same...the flat, emotionless gaze of a polite but disinterested stranger...Now and then a patronizing smile but never the joyous reunion Edith craves.

She. He. Whomever is lost to Edith remains gone and she is doomed to search for them in the eyes of strangers.

Today, when she sees me she raises her shaking arms. Tentatively biting her trembling lower lip, she reaches out to me, daring to hope once again...

"You?" she whispers.  "The one?"

"There you are!" I cry, rushing to kneel beside her wheelchair.

I stretch my hand high to meet hers, watching as she tenderly curls her long, frail fingers around my own.

"It's you?" she whispers. "The one?"

I think of every lost loved one, every missing and broken piece of my heart, chipped away by time.  I bring my grief up, letting it settle in the back of my throat as I meet her eyes and nod, slowly, yes.

"It's really me," I whisper.  "I'm here."

"Oh," she breathes. "I thought...I hoped..."

When the nurse walks by, Edith grabs her leg, stopping her.

"Look," Edith cries. "It's her. The one. I thought so...I knew it! You knew it!" She looks at the nurse, the hope riding plain on her anxious face.

"Yes," my friend, the nurse, agrees, nodding, her smile now as big as our own foolish grins. "It's her. The one."

"Ohhh," Edith breathes, relaxing into her chair. "I knew she'd come...that one...she came."

Love, I am learning, is never really lost.