Looking back

He laid in bed unable to sleep. She remained fixed in his mind, the way the cold ear hugs the ocean breeze as it breaches the shores and travels northward and inland over mountains and buildings alike. It felt like a shaking, an unshakeable shuddering, though he did not feel it in his skin or his bones. Rather the feeling remained ever tethered to his mind, pulsating, immovable, and radiating.

It was the thought of her, her voice, a year of absence from a thing so familiar and so warm. She was beautiful yes! Brilliant, courageous, unyielding in her conviction and honest with her heart. Though these things drew him to her at first, it was something else, her personality—her spirit—her very being—these things that encompassed her had also encompassed a place in his own heart. Tried as he did to purge it, fill it, even eradicate the possibility of the emotions—these things are easier said than done. Even now the doing remains an impossible task.

At least if felt like he had to do something, for in the voice that had called to him, such a dear voice he remembered a yearning crawl outward from the dormant places of his soul. The voice was the echo in a large and cavernous den, a stream of a river that filled this lonely place, its sound spewing a silent stream of breath and air into the unlit places of his mind.

But she had moved on, she had told him so. Their separation put her through much, much more than he had imagined, more even than he had feared. And in that while as he strayed from her, he himself had stumbled upon new paths, the moss that grows slowly on the rocks and the chirp of the insects that forged between the waters. There were even other voices, voice in his loneliness that he twice followed. Nearer he approached he paused, for her voice made him always turn back. A voice that penetrated his ears, tracing its path into his nervous system until it completely nonplussed his emotions and being. It was only this voice he cared about. The silent cave gave him greater freedom than the sounds of minstrels and imitators of this sound.

Yet he heard her voice again and he called out back. The hymn so profound, it took him back—to a religious place, a site sacred and unbreakable. He bit his tongue, he had to, there was no recourse because he could not take back what had passed. He often wondered were he a magician, or a time-traveling scientist, or even a dreamer still asleep in a slumber gone bad—

He would unwind all the days just to see her smile at him back…like she use to before he lost the faith. He lost it, and now she lost it too. Still if only he could just let her know, just a simple text. He just wants her to know—though he suspects she already suspects.

He cannot keep away, even if it means nothing, it still means something. He wants her to know that still she was on his thoughts, immutable, ever present, ever with him. She had taught him love, the only love he ever really knew—the only love he ever wants to know.

He contemplates the send button, ever a battle of what is right and wrong! Yet how can love be wrong, even when the world comes crashing down, love is love. Why did it take him so long to figure it out—