Day #16

One sock. That's all it took to snap me back to my new reality. One lousy sock...

Earlier in the day I had brought a load of laundry down from Damian's bedroom. The load consisted of the sheets off his bed and bunch of socks that I found in his bed or under it. Unbeknownst to me at the time, one of the socks had fallen out of the pile as I walked down the stairs from his bedroom. I only found it later, when I wasn't looking for it. 

When I saw the sock on the stairs, it was all by itself on the staircase. Under normal circumstances, this would have been unusual. In the before the stairway was almost always buried in a collection of shoes, sweatshirts, school stuff, and jackets. All of it Damian's. Now everything was gone. Picked up, sometime in the after, by either me or his mom. All the things that were Damian gone from the stairs except now for this one sock that had innocuously fallen from a pile of laundry. 

As I climbed the stairs to retrieve the sock, the finality of what had taken place struck me. Hard. These stairs will never be messy again. At least not because of Damian. Because he is...(still) gone. Forever. Big sigh. Now I'm really sad. (Again.)

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