The Light Between Us

The Light Between Us

From sun up to sun down, the hours stretch like a fragile thread, thin and trembling, holding me to this world. Each morning, the first sliver of light finds me in a battle I didn’t ask to fight. I rise, not because I want to, but because my body remembers how. The day is a long breath in, a longer one out. I move through it like a ghost in my own life, hands clutching the edges of routines my husband once shared—a cup of tea steeped just as he liked, a hymn hummed to fill the hollow where his voice once lingered.

By day’s end, I am spent. Not in the way of muscles tired from labor, but in the way a storm spends itself against a shore, leaving only residue. My heart, once a harbor for so much love, now feels like a tide pool, salt and silence. I tell God my name again and again in the quiet hours, not to pray, but to remember I am still here. Some days, the weight of that is enough. Other days, it is not.

There is guilt in this grief—a soft, insistent whisper that I did not lean into his love enough, did not say stay when he crossed the threshold I could not follow. I miss him with a ferocity that sometimes knocks the wind from my lungs. There are no words for that ache, only the spaces between them: the empty chair, the unopened letter, the way the house sighs in the places he once walked.

But even in this narrow valley of survival, there are moments. A sunbeam through the kitchen window. A fragrance like his cologne on a forgotten sweater. A verse in scripture that feels less like a stranger. I clutch them like fireflies in a jar, fragile light against the dark. I do not yet have the strength to give these moments to another. I can only hold them, and let them hold me.

From sun up to sun down, this is my offering now—not joy, not peace, but the raw, unpolished edges of a life learning to bend, not break. And sometimes, in the quietest spaces, I think I hear his voice in the wind, not asking why I linger, but smiling because I do.

The road ahead is long, and I walk it one breath at a time. But here, in the light between us, I am not alone.