2 November

Simon.

Took a morning run today. And it was this amazing morning. There’s no real reason, why I should compare it to what I’m about to compare it too, but somehow it felt like opening my grandma’s music box when I was small – you remember, the one with the doves on the top, that I wasn’t allowed to touch, but I would sneak into her bedroom when she thought I was going to the toilet, and stand on my tiptoes and drag it off the bureau and crouch down in the tiny space between the bureau and the closet and my heart would start to beat really fast and I would imagine the things that would happen when I opened the lid, and then I would, ever so slowly, peeking through the crack and watching to see the exact moment when the music would start… and then It would, and the little bird would spin around that tree in the center, and the song would play – clair de lune… of course – and I would sit there, and feel like I was on some kind of magic carpet of music box Debussey… and somehow that was what this morning was like. The mist off the lake, all brown and still and glassy… and I had to stop a moment on that footbridge over the meadow… I’ve never seen it like that before. It was this incredible patchwork of colors… gold and brown and green and the purple of the Spanish broom and those yellow spiky things, and this red-orange color that has sprung up everywhere this fall… the birds swooping low, and that little soft spring bubbling and it was that same feeling. Like I had opened some magical box and there was this beauty just pouring out all around, and me wrapped right up in it. And then I wished for you. Because I always wanted you to be there in my grandma’s room, those times I escaped with clair de lune. And because I know you would have known. …. And … and I wasn’t going to say this, because, well, because it’s one of those especially pathetic things, but nobody reads these anyway, so what the hell… and because I pretty much wish you were everywhere I am. And because I can’t forget what it feels like sitting on the jetty like we used to, me all wrapped up between your arms, my head leaning back in that place it fit so perfectly. That place just below your collarbone. And the way you’d always wrap my hand up inside yours, all safe and snug, and the way I could hear your heart beating, and our breathing would always match up… and I miss you in ways I can’t even say. And this morning was a treasure. Glorious. But it wasn’t half as nice as it would have been if you had been there to stand behind me on the bridge, with your hands around my waist, feeling your breath on my hair, and eventually we’d find ourselves swaying like we always did. Making a dance of everything. 

And I have to stop. Because … because I might actually kill myself one of these days with what isn’t. With what can’t even ever be. With you.