Free Flight. When my husband left for another woman, leaving me with debts and empty walls, my mother kept saying, 'It's okay, daughter, life is a boomerang. He will come crawling back when things get tough for him there. Everything comes back around.' And I believed it. I lived with that belief for five years as if in a waiting room: I didn't date, I didn't renovate, just waiting for the day that this 'boomerang' would hit him on the head and bring him back to my doorstep. But yesterday I saw a photo of him. He is doing great: his own business, a new daughter, a happy smile. No reckoning, no pangs of conscience. My boomerang didn't return. He simply chose freedom and flew off over the horizon without even looking back. And only standing at the mirror did I suddenly realize: all this time, I was the idiot standing in an open field with outstretched arms. I wasted five years of my only life waiting for someone else's misfortune, which never happened. It turns out that a boomerang might not come back, but the time you spent waiting never comes back either.