Cogitation on Loss

Perhaps, for her, time is moving too slowly. But for me tomorrow will be as unfamiliar as some foreign country. I'll be unable to recognise myself, the ones I've loved will have gone, and in the flurry of a moment, I'll be changed again. I sometimes sit and wonder how she can urge another day to us, when the movement of my time is like the precarious swim, further and further, out to sea. There she stands, a beacon to those lost yet still in sight of land, I find that the salt consumes and engulfs me and that I am unable turn back. I cannot see her, But I feel the heat of the light, I feel that if I look back for a moment, I'd drown in the memories I've tried to escape all these years.

I sit in the evening, smoking, I think of her and the poignancy of shared time in the memoirs of youth. As the ash drops and the smoke escapes my nose, I wonder if I'm breathing her out or letting her in. The night keeps me away from day, the drink keeps me numb and sane, and regret struggles out of me like water dripping from ice on a winter morning.

In these colder days, my mind drifts to the aching that once so consumed me. The sting of heat on cold makes my hands burn as I find old relics of lovers past... and hers. An old bag, trinkets and cheap earrings, all incomprehensibly important and entirely inconsequential. The objects could be anything, it's not a satchel I see here, nor do I see the jewellery as mere faux ostentatiousness, I see the girl I once loved with all the facets that constitute me. The ghost of her likeness lingers in these unloved belongings, these old objects that thaw my mind here in this place.

"When I was young, my feet found the way,

Through the woods, to the edge, of an old English lake...

Poets and thinkers would there cogitate,

The meaning of love, and of loss, and of hate."

Anyway, she's long away now, I've no idea where she is or even whether she's alive. She told me long ago... that if love returned, to look for the sea.

I truly wish her well.