I am thinking of someone lost to me. The stories we told each other, the ghosts we summoned. We thought it would last forever. I don't even know what "it" is: our home, our closeness, our lives together. As she would say, "Nobody knows how I feel."
To love a place so much it hurts. When I go there I am haunted by someone ten miles down the road. Our mother used to say, "You'll have many friends, but only two sisters." Hey--Willoughby Moon. Going to keep this up forever? This seems an appropriate day to ask. M's summer birthday.
A favorite poem, and I know you get it. The beach is the valley our fathers called their home. Lost love...
Under Saturn by William Butler Yeats
Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought Because I have no other youth, can make me pine; For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought, The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone On a fantastic ride, my horse's flanks are spurred By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen, And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard, And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died Before my time, seem like a vivid memory. You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay - No, no, not said, but cried it out - 'You have come again, And surely after twenty years it was time to come.' I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vain Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.