A man.

People is waiting. She knows she needs to be fast. They are all waiting for her to choose the epitaph that is to be written in his grave.

She feels the pressure on her. What if she is mistaken? What if what she decides to write is not what he would have wanted to be written in his eternal mud bed?

But who would care after all? He was dead. Maybe in twenty years nobody would ever remember him and nobody would care about reading his epitaph, right?

Wrong. She would still care, she will always do.

Years before they even got married, he had told her that in case he died before her, he wanted her to write his favorite Albert Einstein quote on his grave: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources".

She thought it was a pretty weird epitaph for him to choose.

Now that he was dead, she remembered that talk. She would have written that quote with no much more trouble, but then she recalled hearing him say : "You know Im crazy, but I always mean what I say. When that moment arrives (if it does) just remember that you know me better than I know myself, you will know what to do". So now she was deliberating whether he really wanted her to write that quote or if he had meant something more.

Indeed she knew him better than anyone else in the world. The idea was so stupid that she felt pity about herself thinking about it. Why was his last phrase bothering her so much? "You will know what to do."

She whispered words of hate trying to make the feeling go away. She wanted to let go and move on as fast as possible. She just needed to tell them which epitaph would be written on her husband´s grave but she just could not do it.

She knew him, she knew him so well... but he knew her very well too. And he was right, he meant every single word he had ever said. 

That was the answer! She loved him.

That stupid quote could go to hell, she loved him.

She said to herself that she had loved him since the first time she saw him and it was not a cliché for her to say that, it had actually been real! She had loved every inch of him, every inch of skin, every inch of soul... And nobody else would understand it, nobody but her and him.

She took a pencil and wrote extremely fast the secret that had been always lingering between them. She knew it was the way he wanted to be remembered: "Here lays a man. A real man who has been loved by me."


Taking part in Thursday Poets Rally