Golden Box Book Publishing GBBPub February Magazine | Page 5

mourning period by now. She thought, sighing deeply. As she sat down
on the bench by the side of the grave, she let the tears fall for the first
time in a week.
She allowed herself to cry only when she’d made her weekly walk
to the cemetery. She hid her sadness and tears from her family and
friends. They kept telling her she was only eighteen and had her whole
life ahead of her, so there was no reason for her to hold on to the boy
she once loved.
They aren’t the ones who lost the only person they could ever
imagine loving. Such was her thought as she ran her tongue over her
upper lip, tasting the salty tears. She fished a handful of tissues from
her purse, wiped her face and blew her nose, whispering under her
breath, “None of them believe in soulmates, Cal, and I can’t get them to
listen to me when I try to tell them what it was like between us. Not
even my sisters understand. Mom and Dad keep telling me there’s
someone else out there for me, and I know they’re saying it in the belief
it should help, but it doesn’t. It just makes me think of you more, and of
the future, we planned together before it all fell apart.”
Caleb’s Universe
“How could I do this alone, Val?” Caleb reached out and gently
traced the name, Valerie Taylor, carved into the white marble
headstone, with his fingers. “We were meant to be together until we
grew old.”
As he had done every week since she passed, he sat down in front of
the gravestone. Leukemia had taken her from him, moving so much
faster than either of them could ever have imagined possible. All the
plans they’d had for what was going to come meant nothing. She was
gone.
Caleb sighed to ease the heaviness in his chest and looked up at the
tree covered with flowers, close to the grave. “We had studied here