Author's Note: This poem woke me up at three in the morning insisting that I write it down, after I fell asleep reading the scene in ROTK where Faramir proposes to Eowyn. Marriages that occur during wartime seem to be of two types, the ones that surviv the coming of peace and the ones that don't.

Waking

by Dancingkatz

I woke up after dark
thinking you called my name
but you didn't.

You lay there beside me breathing
not so quietly; all right,
I'll be honest, you snore...

And though I can touch your skin
and my breath flutters
the strands of your hair
I feel as though I'm alone and lost.

Restless as the wind that is
shaking the slender tree outside the window,
I throw the covers aside and pace
from one end of the bedroom to the other
until the walls are too close
and the ceiling too low.

I move into the other room
where a black cat sits
looking wise, his eyes glowing,
reflecting the light that filters
through the velvet curtains from
the moonlight gleaming in this
most nightly of hours
as far from dawn as from the dusk.

Suddenly sick and weak with
with a hopeless anxiety
I fall onto the couch
and he lets me sit next to him
just tucking his paws and tail
neatly out of the way
as if he knows my restlessness
might accidentally step on them
even if my feet do not.

I feel closer to this furred
familiar than I am to the one
who I swore to love for all time.

The cat purrs while my heart stutters,
wondering what is missing from
what I once had.

How can I grow so far away from you
when it seemed not so long ago that
it would be impossible
to live without you?

Did I mistake infatuation for
the kind of love that lasts through time?
Or was love really there
and did I by not nurturing it
starve it to death so that
all that remains is a strained tolerance
for each other's company?

Sitting in the dark, I reach out
to pet the cat and find him gone
like the life I thought to have with you.

I get up to wander in the dark house
while you sleep the sleep of the just
and wonder how I will tell you the truth.