The Moment Before Reason

For a moment, I thought I saw you yesterday. But it was just a particular shade in a stranger's hair, a tilt of the head or the angle of a smile on an unknown face. It seems you are refracted-my images of you, fractured, playing across a million foreign faces like glimmering rainbows cast by the prism of distance, intangible, insubstantial. I would not have thought I knew you well enough to see you where you are not, in the glint of a man's glasses on the bus or even the feet of a fellow dancer. The way a nose wrinkles in a smile, the shape of a slender finger, a neck's particular slope as it becomes shoulder- you are all around me, silent strangers reminding me of your absence. In the moment before reason, there is just time enough for an inhalation and the flash of your name across my mind like lightning across the sky and then you are gone, swallowed alive by harsh reality, and I realize, having had to say goodbye again, how very much I miss you. We are separated by thick walls of time and space, penetrated only by a feverish imagination starved of you. I did not think I missed you until my heart leapt at the sight of you, only to be cut down by reason, shouting its truel truths- that you aren't here, that you can't be here- and i realized just how much I wished you were.

I write this to you, my friends, so you will know, as I now do, that I miss you more than words can say, more than reason can explain or even describe. This is my love letter and my lament, for though neither of us is irrevocably removed from this fallen earth, the distance winding between us, literally oceans away, feels as impassable as the gap 'twixt life and death. We stand on the edges of the chasm and shout, scream until we have no breath, and ultimately, we turn away and live our lives apart. Living, simply being, causes our characters to change, grow, evolve, When I return, dear friend, who will you be? Will I recognize you in the flesh? Perhaps more frightening still- who will I be?

When such thoughts cloud my mind and precipitate into tears, your wise words, spoken in a quiet, tearful moment, decend about my shoulders like a warm arm-

"It's only for a year."


Note to readers: I wrote this in a very blue moment. Rereading it now, it seems extraordinarily overdramatic, but that's what makes it fun to write. It's not always this bad. Some of the occurances of the word "you" in this post are plural, some are not. You're smart. You can figure it out. But hey- it's got imagery, analogies, metaphores out the wazzoo, just a dash of alliteration, heck, even death. By gum, It's a bona fide piece of literature!