Things Claudia misses: She misses being in love and her husband being in love with her. She misses the way they looked at each other. She tries to emulate the look, sometimes, when he’s home, she tries to look at him this way, tries to somehow engage his soul, but he doesn’t look at her the way she needs anymore, he just doesn’t, he doesn’t have that power anymore, he grew up and drove away from that imaginary world. She misses the spaces between their kisses, when they looked at each other with such shock and ecstasy at having found each other at all in this soiled world. But this world, she has been forced to discover, is not about love. Love is not all you need. More so, what you need is money, Rob says. She misses the nights they spent together pouring out their souls and swirling them about together in the light summer air while drinking pineapple vodkas under the awning. She misses feeling like she is not only his but him, that he is her, that they literally see through the same eyes. She misses being shocked by how familiar his voice seems, like a voice she knew in a distant time. She misses being so ridiculously happy that she is terrified, standing at the tip-top, terrified that the only thing to do now is come down, whether gradually by rope or by parachute-less free-fall. She wishes their love was a perfect raindrop, quivering and full, suspended forever in animation. In this way she knows she is just a girl, and will always be just a girl. She has been mourning the loss of their love for the past ten years while he’s been…well, she doesn’t know. Before, she could feel it. She could feel what he was feeling, doing. Perhaps the distance the road has put between them is too great. Claudia feels like she has seen too much, experienced too much, her eyes have been tainted with goodness so that she cannot appreciate anything less. And every day she feels she has less—she has not her Rob, nor her daughters, nor her son Saul, who walks past her like she’s a dirty beggar. She wants to return all the feelings and the love she’s spent, spent on relationships, flawed and tired relationships, as all sooner or later seem to become. She is a woman who has seen too much. If she hadn’t, she would be content alone. She is an independent woman, or so she likes to think of herself. Independent before by choice and complacency and now by fate and time. She misses being intoxicated by anything other than alcohol, by hidden swigs from the flask in her purse. Little by little, Claudia and Rob shut their doors—loud and boisterous slams, soft and secret shoves—doors they had once opened wide and willingly to one another. And now they stand in separate rooms. Claudia paces her small room year after year, wondering less how they fell out of love than how they fell in love. She believes if she could just remember, and make Rob remember, they might find home in each other again. If, perhaps, for a moment, they may pass through their hidden gates—gates they have left like a single crumb in the woods, gates they have hidden from one another and eventually from themselves, spaces in the crumbled brick of the walls that they have built against each other over time. Every issue became a brick: every problem, every fight, every false move, every piercing word said, every needed word unsaid. (Their egos had been shed upon their meeting and then slowly willed back.) But they each left an open space, a gate, however small. If…perhaps…they crossed that space simultaneously. Claudia has visited this clearing many times. Rob? God only knows. But perhaps if together…..Perhaps, if Adam and Eve had had the opportunity to re-enter paradise. The world might have remained at once both beautiful and true. But this isn’t paradise, Claudia’s sister, mother, and friends remind her, no matter how she insists that she has indeed glimpsed it.