I thought about you today

I thought about you today. There is no way to know what brought it on, but as fast as the thoughts ran through my mind, an old wound that my head had forgotten begun to throb in a tucked away corner of my heart.

I didn’t know. How could I have known that one day, in the middle of everything, your face would come unbidden to me in a way that made me sure if I reached out just far enough, I could touch the deep chocolate of your skin. I saw your eyes dance; your large beady eyes that joked way too much when everyone else was striving for seriousness. Did I like you at first? No. Everyone had told me how annoying you could be. With everything I had to work out about myself, surely handling annoyance from elsewhere was never a priority. I interacted with you as little as I could at first. Then one day you may have set out to come and have a chat with me, but I realized later, you came to set me on a healing path. Those beady eyes? They saw what nobody else saw. You saw my loneliness and confusion and reached out so that I could know I was not alone. To tell me that being alone was not an option for as long as you were around. I don’t know if you would remember how many times we ate together, how we bonded over that. I came to learn that with the way your mind worked, giving was something that gave you more joy and peace than anything else could, in ways nothing else would. It took a little longer for me to understand that this was not a common thing. In a world where people took as much as they could, you did just the opposite. And it wasn’t just about stuff. You shared information so easily! Anything I wanted to know, I only had to ask. Some of the best stuff never waited for questions; it came pouring out of you. We loved to talk!

Time then did its thing and set us apart. So far in fact that I struggle to remember the last time you gave me one of those deep, healing hugs. The ones where you would not let me go until whatever darkness I was carrying had evaporated. I miss you so badly it hurts physically. I find peace in knowing I told you that I loved you. If I could go back into the past, AO, all that time we spent together at prep time, in the morning dodging the school matron, at lunch wondering why we were not at home and bottle it in a jar so special that at a time like this, I would only have to uncork it and be filled by the beauty of who you were. Keep resting in peace darling. Heaven will rock because you are there. I didn’t know how blessed I had been to know you until I found myself on my own, one of maybe two hundred people in a church queueing up to view your body in a white casket. I still remember just where my heart broke. And it is that old wound that’s tearing me up this cold and rainy night.