1944 (enough)

He had wide margins. I could breathe, swim, jump, run and know, through it all, he was there, same easy smile, same blanket arms. Virgil was Sunday morning breakfast. He was a full bellied afternoon nap. My fingers as children running through the waves of his hair. Waterfalling those beautiful brown eyes. He was the ground under this war and I knew no matter how much we moved, he would not. A harbor into I sailed. Fresh as ocean breeze. But all I can remember now is the smell of his blood on my hands and the taste upon my lips as I kissed his eyes shut. Of how time is not what we think it is.

I’ve lived a night and a day that seem as years and I’ve lived years that seem as nothing. The weight of a thing is measured not in seconds or minutes or hours. Just put your head under water and tell me of the air that enters your lungs after only a minute, maybe two. He was that breath. He was a light to eyes that had never known light. He was a reason prior not known, and as quickly, never again found.

But nothing is as words posit them to be, something always missing or lacking in the writing. He was everything in my life that was not indifference. Never has a man brought so many smiles and so many tears and for neither would I trade the world for I have lived with him as few live and I have lived without him as even fewer could. He entered my life, briefly and changed it forever. And he never knew.

So I dream of heaven, not for my sake, but his. That in his waiting, he had a place to know of where he took me. And I dream of heaven for how could he not come to know of what he gave me? How could he not be waiting to take me for that walk through the pasture, his hands behind his back, head bowed, listening to my years, the memory of him I kept sacred, of how I loved and never forgot that in this life there is but one path that crosses another and to meet at that crossroads, even for just the night and day we had, is enough.