Night Secrets

It is said that the night holds a thousand secrets.  And that is true for me.  Because late at night, after my wife has gone to bed, I become a time traveler.  My travels begin when I walk up the stairs and walk by the rooms that my children used to occupy when they lived at home.  I enter their rooms and stand beside their empty beds and it is there that I am transported. 

When they were young I would enter their rooms and look in on them before going to bed, just to reassure myself that they were alright.  I would stand beside them looking down on them, sometimes placing my hand on their backs to feel them breathing or I would brush my hand against their hair.

I would be filled with a great bursting of wonder and love.  Here were two people who lived because of me; whose personalities and habits would be shaped in part because of me; whose lives would forever be entwined with mine. Standing there I would wonder who they would become and what they would do with their precious lives; who they would meet and who they would love.

And, I wondered if they would continue to love me as our relationship evolved.  I wondered when they would discover that I did not have all the answers and that I was not a superhero.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, a time traveler such as me must return to the present.  And I always have to return from my travels in the past to those empty beds of the present.  Most of my questions about my children from those days have been answered.  They long ago discovered that I was not a superhero and that there are many things I do not know.  Our love for each other has evolved and it has withstood the passage of time. 

But, sometimes, when they are visiting, I will walk by their bedrooms and quietly open their doors.  And in their sleeping, I see them as they once were and I am once again transported to a long ago time.


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