She came to me not long past the tick of midnight, some time ago (years, years, and years).  I sat on the pier and stared at the precipice of the rolling darkness that I knew was the breathing mass of the sea, even if I could not prove it at the moment. The moon had taken the night off from her divine duty. In her stead, a complete void; a life-affirming circumstance.

She sat down next to me; a bottomless multitude of goosebumps pulled sharply at the hairs on the back of my head and the tops of my arms from the adrenaline and dopamine that drenched my body as a result of the softest, most caring touch of knowing fingers that slowly and politely wrapped around my throbbing neck. Her breath painted the tip of my left ear with the caring shadow of both fear and the most gentle hint of affirmation. Instantly, the white crests of the waves before us blurred into pixelated cotton balls suspended by magic and faith, swaying in the autumn breeze of my vision that was largely influenced by the expanding, embarrassing domes of tears that gradually filled the useful and very necessary sections of my eyes quicker than logic could my quiet heart.

Guided, moved, motivated, she controlled my hands without touching them; the slightest, imagined hint of her words proved as stimuli incomparable. Eyes closed, trembling lips, I (she?) traced and embraced the damage report of my distant, stormy past in the thickest blackness of the infinite night, quickly followed by the briefest keyhole-glimpse of the (at the time) unpredictable, ever spreading panorama of the future.

I cried. There is no cool way to say this.

I struggled to speak. I stared at my feet before surrendering completely to the timeless spell of intense shame that settled upon me as a wet sheet of paper carelessly dumped upon an ant hill by an ignorant child sprinting her way home from school. With a single silver sliver of intoxicating moonlight that traced to almost geometric perfection the exact middle portion of one of my (expensive, thanks) shoes, I read the question, zoomed out as it was drenched in a tear that fell and temporarily stained the dark gray rock that served as my (our?) foundation: “What if?”

In that moment, to me, the shimmer in the centers of her eyes could have ended the pointless tragedy of war if only the heart-amputees in charge of global politics decided to pause for the briefest moment  to acknowledge the correcting, guiding light of her aura. Her hair in even the mildest suggestion of a breeze could bless nations for time unforeseeable to me. Her words formed the unwritten fifth gospel (sorry, not sorry).

We conversed in silence for hours on end, her shoulder the resting place of my emotionally bruised and battered head. In that moment, I prayed for Superman to fly around Earth and reverse time as he does in the old comics to hopefully, hopelessly drag out this specific moment in time for time eternal. If the selfish wetness of my eyes and the exposing shakes in my fingers could serve as currency for a blessing, my requests were backlogged in the warehouses of the infinite.

Did I mention that I cried?

Was there even a total for the amount of prying questions with which I prayed to assault her? Indeed, they were loaded in my right hand just next to the very typical, fantasized, angry reactions to a man putting his hands on a lady for whom I felt even the lightest ounce of shiny, drunk love.

Without speaking, she chased away shadows and pumped my heart full of light. She increased both my verbal and emotional vocabulary without even an uttered syllable, a metaphorical reflection of the light of the distant moon, the degree of which I earned by simply sitting silently by her side. What spell spoke she upon the dirt mound of me?

I could not decide why I was unable to channel her verbal, emotional mastery into my own small expressions of artistic complaints. Even today, I can smell her shampoo, yet not do I walk the same timeline as she. Aggressively did small me dream of companionship with a spirit that flowed through perceived chronology long before I first clutched a rattle yet closer to she do I feel than to a political party or any sports team.

Harshly do I stumble across this path of mine, yet in the moments thickest with layers of frustratingly impenetrable quilts of darkness and the sadly unavoidable flurry of life’s question marks, I feel the heat of the very suggestion of light shot forth from words long forgotten yet subconsciously heard.


To sum up this mess, in the words of the immortal saint Maya Angelou:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.