"It is really beautiful up here" she whispered.

Her skin brightened in the glow of the fading masterpiece of crimsons, yellows, and golds the sun had brushed across the turquoise sky "This is it, this is what heaven is like."

I couldn't hear her, but I could read her soft spoken lips and study her face, which I always imagined as less of the cover to a book and more every word inside. There was not a greatness of a sadness that ceased to mask her portrait. She was all heart and soul, every bit of her.

I watched as her bright eyes change to become more glass than eyes. As if, for the first time, she was seeing life, love, and something more. Something so deep and beautiful that not even Hemmingway or Fitzgerald could even begin to put the prefix of it into thought.

Among the dusting of the clouds and transparent sunset I felt her heartbeat could silence and the lungs of which gave her the life I so cherished could empty turning her flesh a pale blue, and she would fade peacefully into the scene before me.

This very thought frightened me. Too soon would her feet touch the ground and nothing I was humanly capable of, or possibly godly capable of, would ever captivate and hold her so perfectly or turn her eyes as vivid - and there was nothing more I wanted.

Shh

my eyes
    are heavy

and

my heart
   is heavier

I wanted to
give you the world
but all I have
are these
two small hands
and they
only hold so much

Sometimes books make me unhappy
because there are probably too many of them
to read before I die.

My body is weighted
And my bones ache
But my mind is wandering
And my soul misplaced

(I can’t sleep….)

Traveling to the only
place of comfort
It has ever known

I’m falling.


( Shh.)

Morning woke me with aching fingers and the burdensome weight of you heavy on my mind. Holding my guitar and fumbling over every note, I imagine you. Your eyes gazing over me in a crowd, as if I was invisible - until the music effortlessly plays from my fingertips, singing each word in harmony, my heart on my sleeve. I imagine you…noticing me.

Hours have passed and the sun has long left, replaced by a cold breeze and a dark starless sky.

I lay my guitar down beside me, my fingers numb and calloused, realizing that somewhere between morning and now I had lost you, the crowd, …the imagined moments. But, in the midst of the music, the repetitive strums and voicing my soul alongside every chord, I found myself.

*Tonight, I will sleep peacefully

I want to fight you
and never close my eyes
for I’m afraid when I do
I will find the memories
of which I can’t let go
I’ll relive all he is
all I was beside him

To wake from this
desperately grasping to find
his heartbeat
feeling it as nothing more
than a pillow between
my trembling white knuckles

Knowing it was just a dream
Is to relive the relentless ache
of losing him all over again