MargenWhen we were courting and lived far apart, we met at eleven under the same streetlamp, the one by the closed kiosk. It was the midpoint between his house and mine: we each walked twenty minutes to steal another twenty from the night.
Then we married, we lived under one roof, and the streetlamp stopped making sense. You don't arrange to meet the person sleeping beside you.
He died in autumn, after a whole life of sleeping beside me. And now, some nights when the bed turns enormous, I wrap up and go out, and walk the same twenty minutes to the closed kiosk.
I stand under the streetlamp, at eleven, the way we did when we were twenty and had the whole road ahead. Nobody comes, of course. But the light is still on, and for a while I am the one waiting again, which is the one who still has everything.