Small Reprieve

Everyday I walk past the primary school on the corner near my street. The children play, unnoticed by me in the hurried, late dash to lectures. But today there was a family. Of three and a dog. The small boy, clutching his shirt across his tiny heart in his hand, a tear slowly falling from an unblinking eye, watching his sister walk without looking back into the playground. Her pink satchel falling into the mingles of other kids. The family waits. The small dog tucks at their heels. The tear falls in silent slowness. I stare at them. They at me. Clutching to my own heart, thinking this begins the lifelong charge of separations and losses for which grief offers only but small reprieve.