I’m starting this blog with a meaningful story that I wrote for my wife, Emily, for Valentine’s Day in 2009. We had chosen not to purchase each other gifts, but technically, a story isn’t a purchase. This may be the most heartfelt short story I’ve ever written.

Love Song
by Joel Durham Jr

A man died young after a long illness, and his widow grieved.

She was young, not even 30, and quite pretty, and probably could have remarried easily. Nevertheless, she held onto his memory in a most unhealthy way, until it was two years hence and she still habitually wept every night at bedtime.

On the second year, to the day, after his passing, she tearfully hung up the phone after a long conversation with her mom and sat at a dinette table in her tiny apartment to wait for water to boil. A teabag perched on the counter beside a mug. Green tea relaxed her after dinner, settled her stomach.

She’d done everything she could to purge not her memory of him, but at least to make life feel different. She’d moved to a different town, packed away the clothes he’d bought her, took away most of his pictures, and even refused to watch the shows he liked and listen to the music he once loved.

She did, though, listen to one CD, so much so that the lyrics and melodies filled her head most of the day. It was a rough work with only four songs, unprofessionally recorded on a low budget computer in the attic of the house they’d once shared.

Don’t run from the things you can’t change
they don’t make a difference anymore
keep telling yourself you’re okay
until it doesn’t matter what’s in store

The hacked words and disharmonious, synthesized music didn’t bother her. He wrote and mastered it all for her, months before his death, and he and she were the only two people who’d ever heard it. The most exclusive club in the world, down to a single member.

She wondered about him, where he was, if he still existed at all. If, wherever the winds of afterlife take a soul, if he still thought of her.

Two years to the day. She remembered the phone call at work, and then rushing, speeding to the hospital, praying to drink in one more glimpse of his eyes, but when she got there they were lifeless and covered by a sheet. She still felt guilty, even now; once in their lives he’d said something like he hoped her face would be be the last thing he ever saw.

It was probably a hospital ceiling, his final sight, or something. She’d never know, she only felt she’d failed him.

The memories were too powerful. She was already quietly sobbing, standing there sobbing, steeping lightly aromatic tea when she wanted vodka, and lots of it. There was one thing to do.

She walked, eyes goopy with saltwater, and ceremoniously inserted the CD into her little portable player, which she’d wired to her stereo. The music would begin after a slow fade into the first song.

She sadly wandered back toward the kitchen and stopped. She’d put in the wrong CD. No, impossible. His work of music was always in the same place, if it wasn’t in the player already.

And the guitar, the soft acoustic guitar, the rhythmic strums and plucks, were doubtless his style. She’d heard it so many times. But this tune wasn’t familiar. And then–

And then, she lost herself in the music.

Not only his acoustic guitar, but his electric one – sounding less like a garage sale generic and more like a Les Paul, slightly distorted the way he arranged most his songs – the two were in perfect harmony, playing not his typical melancholic ditties but a beautiful, powerful, uplifting magnum opus. Every bit of her aural sense was swimming in the brightest music she’d ever heard, complete even with orchestration. The drumbeat was coming from real drums, not pings synthesized by computer.

She closed her eyes and almost, almost felt his embrace. The music was so strong and sweeping it would have, if it could have, taken his very form and held her, and with her eyes closed she imagined it doing just that.

Impossibly, it swelled louder, larger, threatening to overwhelm her. The tears squeezing out her clenched eyes were suddenly tears of impossible joy, a feeling she hadn’t known in more than two years.

Then it was gone, and she stood oddly out of breath. She opened her eyes. Everything was as it was before. The CD in the player wasn’t spinning anymore. The tea had become cold.

She reached for the player and pressed play, and a moment later the usual, oft-heard fade-in began. Whatever had happened, it was done.

But she felt warm and happy. And it felt good to feel good.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and she knew her words would be heard.