My Hidden Universe Within?..... by Julianna Rowe

The Brooch?

Who cares? Two words with an ending mark. A question short of emotion... 

No one, or any particular person, knows I carefully and gently placed a photo of them at my day's end, high atop an antique wardrobe within view of my slumber area. A silent offering to my hidden universe. 

At any interval during any day when I am passing, I look up at the photo while tossing a sweater or socks into the hamper as I move past. Its meaning is only for me. 

No one knows about the seven-year-old wine glass Sarah painted for me. No one cares how I walked from one end of the apartment, weak while recovering from a three-week virus, to the other end to get the bamboo stool from the high bed and walk it back to the kitchen to reach that wine glass on the top shelf of the round corner cabinet. Then walk it back to the old antique wardrobe and fill it with Grandma's or my old brooches, set it just right next to the mirrored box and old doll from Germany not to be seen by anyone, probably ever. Who would care anyway? 

Who would know the one brooch among the many was worn in 1957 at Tillie's fiftieth wedding anniversary dance? Or one of the other ones was worn by me a hundred times while I was a successful insurance agent who walked with a spring in her step and a deep kindness in her heart.

No one knows the fur scarf came from an $800 coat gifted to me by a lover I met while traveling in the South. We would secretly drive to a rendezvous area and make love in nature near a beautiful, huge tree that comes into my mind on days I might need it. To never see him again. Yet the memory touch sparked a cascade of beauty from a different world, offering me a beautiful yet silent language in a glass in my old bedroom wardrobe. Security, that is. The lack of life force energy doesn't offer sustenance. It maintains my temporary life force, but....there is no security at the primal base of my life at this time. None, unless I create it and earn paper money for what I create. 

The brooches do not pay.  The photo memories do not pay.  The rendezvous by the memory tree is a blip in time for what? A minuscule dot in my brain, an intangible nothing no one in any of the vast universes knows of but me. What was it for? Maybe for this moment only? At 3:11 am, four-plus decades later, so an old woman could relive a love rendezvous out in the West Texas countryside with a handsome, rich businessman just like herself. Then driving away, free, long blonde hair loosely wrapped in a scarf blowing in the wind behind me as a sign something had passed. Smile lingering, secure. Unlike today. Where nothing matters, no one calls or cares. The body weakening, the mind failing.

The brooch lay in its wine glass tomb, and I in my tombstone mind.

How to roll it away like they say Jesus did on the 3rd day?

I must roll it away and move forward to get paid and live on. Living isn't free. Only memories are.

Snap out of it. There are many more brooches under the bed and in the box in the closet. More stories to tell. 

You've got this. No one said growing old was going to be easy. 

I lean on my hidden Universe within.