I think of you always, in little practical ways, in grandiose, impossible ways, in private and intimate moments that are yet to be or perhaps to exist only in my imagination.
Children sometimes love their gifts too much. They can wear them down, lose a button or a wheel or scratch off the paint, but their love for it will never pass away. Through this, they learn the value of things and that such things will one day turn to splinters or rags. As time passes, they can ascribe that experience of attrition to people rather than things and learn that a cherished person never goes lost or broken, to be relegated to a shadow of a memory. Instead, they must polish that gift, the gift of the heart and protect it for all that is real and unique in it.
Now, I think of the love you've lost, perhaps just a bit, and how I can never replace it but how I can add to it anew. I may be willing, but I doubt my own ability to succeed. I love my gifts too much, too. I want to hide them under my bed and never take them out for fear they might be broken through my lack of understanding in how they work or what they need to keep working. I am an apprentice without a mentor, meant to find my own way as one of the last lost.
I still smell you and lament that I am neither here nor there, wondering not which way to travel but instead, which map to consult. You may or you may not, but I always will.
