undying loyalties

A promise for beyond the grave: We’re not over yet. Maybe not in this lifetime, but we’ll see each other again. Oh the years I haven’t seen your face, but in my heart sings a sweet bird (returning from your honeymoon) with a sweet secret: No one can take your memory away from me. Your revelation, ten years later, that after that first night you waited an entire day to wash my body’s scent off of your skin, that today you can recall it clearly and (again) feel more alive than ever. I have looked everywhere and I know I’ll never find another friend like you. A rushed good-bye in a parking lot, the car struck by heavy rain and you hugging me as a child seeking shelter from deafening thunder, softly depositing a treasure in my ear: You will always be my baby, you alone. The cloudy moonlight through the curtains and the absolute clarity of your words, drunk but lucid: Never have I lived a most beautiful love scene in my entire life.

Undying loyalties, flashes of life that no one can unknot or possess for another. Indestructible kernels of truth for one, two at most. Sandcastles, gifts. How gladly would I lay them down — all my never-haves and always-wills, which are really my what-ifs — for the one implacable True Love that, in my dreams, God has in store for me.