Modern labor market and all, I have ended up seeing my wife for a total of twenty six minutes in the last three days to hand off kids to one another as we go to our jobs, or a brief and groggy goodnight kiss as I get home at near two am, and an even groggier goodbye kiss as she goes to leave at past four am. I can’t describe the longness time seems to take when we are kept apart like this having to do what me must as parents to provide for our sons the best we can possibly do. To perceive when she leaves, and is out the door, is a haunting sadness, not by some malicious of sorrowful spirit but by the absence of how the completeness her love makes of me is now afar. To feel her breath on my face as I come home and lay in bed beside her for those two far too brief hours gives me more life than all my own breathing did during the day. To feel her fingers intertwine with my own, and bring my hand close to her heart brings the cooled embers in me to heat giving coals again. It is not that I can’t be happy, or enjoy life without her, I just can’t be as alive, as joyed in life as I am when I am with her. This morning, as I feed our children breakfast, as they smile at me and laugh, I see her in them both and at once am joyous and melancholy. This ‘glorious sadness’, it is one of the ways I know how deeply in love I am and how amazing a thing it is that something which can stir such feelings of blue still leaves me feeling more fulfilled than I could ever imagine, because it is at these lows that I most appreciate and dream all day for the eventual return of those euphoric highs I could have never imagined before I knew her.