Will You Take Her?

The hillscape sings. Whistles its song through hollow carved spruce trunks. My feet are soaked and weighed, there I stumble on my way, yet my socks are dry as the brittle trees.

There is something about the days you know will come. Those some credit to destiny. The days that demand something from your rigid stream of life. The days that lay claim on something, or rather someone from your life. The days that make your own suffering wash away with the tide of other’s.

I know the hills cannot sing, and therefore the melody that I drag my feet to must be that one of a banshee. So I ask you; “Have you finally come to take her?”

But you won’t respond, of course not, and the banshee who calls your arrival weeps eremore. I can hear the rustle in the heather. I feel the weight of your feet there you walk to lay claim on what’s yours, you have waited long enough to take back your beloved.

There you wait to turn her into a child of death.

I can’t see you, not really, but I might as well have been able to. Your face lives readily in my mind. the gray stubble, your thick silver hair, and those conflicted eyes that watered over with love there you sat in your throne—a brittle white plastic chair, and watched us children muck around in play, while smoking like a steam train.

I am selfish, greedy and gluttonous. I want her longer, more, forever. Though my demands go heedless. She has been old for three decades now. I would have fought any that wanted to take her life, if only to make her stay, but when my mind’s eye saw it was you threading past the threshold, the fight in me left.

You were my idol, still are, and in all my efforts to honor you I found life as I know it—the most beautiful gift one can be granted, but perhaps not more beautiful still than an old soul biding his time in wait for his living bride to come join him in what comes after.