774. round the campfire

They sat the campfire for the longest time before Kyra spoke. Read to us Trev. Let us know not of word but of song. Standing with eyes but for Em, he opened his notebook and began to read. Those that were there said later, perhaps it was the night, perhaps the flicking fire upon his face, but as the words rolled forth, something changed and the Trevor they knew was from that moment, but memory.

from the notebook of Trev, a reading:


The house is quiet but for my thoughts. The sky, grey, and the feeling the same, the world colorless without her. I cannot explain this stark dichotomy. Sledgehammer blunt. All or nothing. Light or dark. And what pounds is a longing within my chest to hold and be held, to again luxuriate in her arms as in a warm bath, for that is how it feels, this peace, of a calmness such that comes after a storm, when the air is clean and crisp and the grass bejeweled of recent rain.

I want to walk in the light of her eyes and to know what it is to be looked upon as she looks, as salve and succor to my pains. And there too is reaching without asking, as two old trees our hands branch toward the other and fingers twine a firm warmth beyond my ability to explain. So I look, and perhaps think upon it too much, for I know it is not the holding or lacing or twining for no other hand would do what her hand does, would reach effortlessly into the heart's uncharted terrain and walk therein so freely, as if home, as if always home it was. No it is not the holding and this is why the eye seems so limited, for how to explain what is seen is not what is witnessed or experienced or known? The tongue seems lost, in retreat of a force known within and this, I say, is how it is, this audible click of a puzzle of two, fitting within as the view without.

How to say how one lives in the other, where thought is synchronized simultaneously and where two hearts beat but one is heard, where to separate is to take what is one and make it two and therein lies the pain as surely as there is pain in the breaking of souls grown together. And breathing changes, for how can it not when the life of one is the life of the other and where there is but one, nothing is as it was, nothing the same, a bleeding I would say, a bleeding out of hue, of color as if the very heart itself in protest or melancholy pumps less.

She is somewhere, this very moment. And her beauty is seen by eyes not my own, the lilt of her voice heard beyond my walls upon ears I know, know not the melody of joy I cannot live without. And I praise fate while cursing the same as every clock an enemy, every tick a reminder that the day once lived is lived never more. So I sigh or more so it seems, something within me sighs and I feel it, my soul. I feel it within me as I have never felt before. And this is where they come, these sighs. And they come like waves upon the thought, of a clock ticking, of her sight unseen, her touch unfelt, her whisper lost on the miles for even a stone's throw is too far as too the hour too short.

I am in the hands of something greater than myself. And there is life in me as if reborn to the world for that is how it is. Nothing looks the same, sounds the same, tastes the same. And all my years are but nothing against this tide of her and I feel as helpless as the shore to resist what is coming.