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Chapter 22: The Second Line

Chapter 22: The Second Line

Mr. Wesley Receives Some Unexpected Visitors

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Jeff Whitty
Dec 14, 2023
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Five years ago almost to the day, the love of Wesley’s life beseeched him to let her go and move on when she passed; and weak as she was, Sarah still pretended to get crabby in her funny way, even as Wesley wept from certainty that she was his only in this life.

He was young yet, Sarah argued.

Wesley was 47, then.

Were he to predict his state of mind five years after she died, he could never envision the sad-sack widow that he became, haunting a hoarder’s house cluttered not from acquisition but passivity, a man adrift amidst dunes of sadness accumulated in specks over the years.

He was 52, now.

As the fifth anniversary of Sarah’s passing approached, dread overtook him. What, beyond further loss, did he have to show for his last half-decade on Earth? And what did the future promise? Given his years of solitude, who would miss him if he stepped from the ride altogether?

“Let me go,” Sarah whispered from her hospice bed.

“Let It Go!” declared an advertisement in the Picayune five years later.

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