Mrs. Rochester
They don’t see me, but they feel me everywhere.
When he touches her with his one good hand, he feels me.
When she kisses his scorched eyelids, she feels me.
I woke beneath the rubble and I felt freer than I had ever felt before.
My soul had been taken from me along time ago,
but now I was free to be something else.
To have a purpose, that’s my goal.
When I saw them walking through the ruins,
her plain face resting against his side,
him with his proud head raised defiantly to the sky,
I knew what my purpose was.
I watched them for a while as they murmured to each other
about nearly lost love, heartache and the future.
She blended into the greyness of the dust that rose in shadowy wafts
from my crumbled prison.
Her eyes were dreary, her hair was pale.
I had wanted to touch her then, to feel the skin that he would feel and to smell her scent.
I sit on the chair in the corner of the room watching them
as they move about their house.
He sighs and strains his eyes and I breathe down his neck to remind him.
Claire Bolden McGill is a British expat who lived in Maryland for three years and moved back to the UK in August 2015. Claire wrote about her life as a British expat on the East Coast and now works in travel and hospitality PR in the UK. She still finds time to blog about her repatriation and the reverse culture shock that ensued – and she still hasn’t finished that novel, but she’s working on it. You can contact Claire via twitter on @clairebmcgill or via her blog From America to England.