I drifted on the tidal night away from the bonfire on the water’s edge, finding my way in the late night air up the lane of my childhood home to cross the street, walking the center of the yellow lines which are the center of the road to our house by the lake.
Dark and silence not nearly dark or silent enough.
And I reached out in the midst or mist of fatigue and sadness, calling to a ghost. He didn’t answer.
Resigned to fitful rest, and so on it goes. Haunted. His voice an echo of former solidity, now a spectre. Spooked, spooky.
In a journal entry, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish or the hectic glow of consumption.”
And so, our relationship, though pallid and fraught with falseness, is yet lovely (mirabile visu) to behold. And is this where I say goodbye? Kiss on the forehead, a hand atop your own, a smile and I tell you that it’s okay? You can leave, you can be what you want, do what you want, feel what you feel; I’ll love you forever.
I’m trying to loosen my grip, I see that this cannot sustain, you are not sustaining. My story will differ from yours. I can see the finespun chaos, a costly monument crumbling.
This hectic glow. An ember, a memory of heat and no more.