He dreamed of you. He dreamed of you last night or this morning. You were there, hiding in a room just off the main restaurant-bar place. No real place, except in memory, in imagination and in places of sound or silence. For that most brief of minutes they were hiding as they always did, away from everyone. He searched through the few moments of privacy, where women and men or women and women or men and men go to touch, to smile, to whisper, to share and to be alive. In those most and precious moments of time touch and heartbeats, he was never a lonely soul in a dying world. You were his life for just those quiet heartbeats.
Her face and form dance within his dream. Tiny freckles, lips to laugh, eyes to dance and ears to hear the music of words and silence. Underneath a table and cloth they pressed together knee-to-knee for a short while and then you parted from his dream…of explanations of nothing but life and why and gain and lost and oh…he thought that you had died and visited on your way home just to let him know that they were still…
Sleeping on a sailing ship, he saw her gown as the morning sun poured (if the morning sun can pour through anything) into a window and filled the doorway-sunside framing her body as the opaque texture of her clothing changed because of the light, into a thin and transparent breeze across the shadow of her curves and her beauty and…never before had she become more naked or more clothed than she became on that morning.
Friends and caskets and funerals without flowers. The lines of mourners are shorter. What is left are folk circles talking and laughing and…Caskets usually look the same except for the little ones. These caskets are always too small and too heavy and hard to carry. A physical impossiblity? This depends on the casket bearers and their knowledge of the little one. Inside those tiny boxes is a sorrow so; unexpected, unrequited, unresolved and not replaceable as the sorrow is unnatural. But here, inside the October City, the pressure of the cooker is a great and steaming beast as real as puppies in May and the death of a baby. It hurts and the parent so miss the child that is no longer with her.
However, puppy grows into dog and kittens no longer are interested in chasing streaks of yellow ribbons. Instead, they rest beneath the bright and benevolent sun, warm of bone and slowed with age. They live and they pass by naturally. They come into this world, into this cycle, into pleasure and into pain.
The mother cries against his shoulder and his shirt is damp because of her endless supply of grieving tears. She is phantom. He fears that on this long walk down this even longer aisle, he may let her fall. He has done this before. The long walking aisle. Of this he is positive. There is memories of other mothers and widows and fathers and of old men, well not so many of them anymore, but just a few. He has never drop any of these of insane sorrow and frightening tears. Grief and grief and more grief and Gods hears their tears and understands their insane sorrow.
No falling because they lean against one another for balance or weakness, or sorrow, or memory, and for love.
Now! He walks with her down a carpeted aisle. It is an aisle-covered almost knee-deep in flowers that cannot be correct. They are too sweet a perfume to be real and they grow from metal stands and glass vases that are plastic and cheap and fragile. Memory is a rattling frail movie without projector but still inside their minds. He has helped a few survivors through a shattered hour of loss, of incredible loss, a baby loss, a sacred loss and savaged proof that loss has always been what it is suppose to be. It never disappoints those suffering the curses of death and sacred loss.
He is positive that he has never dropped anyone. Yes! Their precious sorrows and gently leaning into one another and following his lead down the worn carpet and toward the words and tears that ends a dream and begins another and well-oiled reality.
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