Just…beautiful.

Maybe you’ll never notice.
Because you are fireworks, and I am pale skies.
And you are trumpets and claxons, while I am a single harp string.
And I have shy eyes and quiet hands,
and where you are the chorus and the thunder of waves,
I am only a breeze ruffling the grass in the faint and milky dawn.
but
I love you
more than you know.

-Author Unknown

Possibly one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in a long while.

Three hours later on the plane to Calgary, I dreamed horrible, unformed, crimson-tinted dreams. I heard the terrible crunch of bones cracking beneath the weight of fists and boots. I saw the puddles of congealing blood. I must have cried out because the flight attendant asked me if I was all right. I told her I was. She handed me a napkin. I reached for it, suddenly embarrassed to have allowed this woman see me cry, even in my sleep.

…

These days, I can quantify my remaining decades. I can measure them out in life-events. I can gauge my value as a man by who I’ve loved, who has loved me, and by the ones I didn’t love nearly enough. My marriage didn’t last, of course. No one was surprised.

…

I’ve seen you many other times over the years, sometimes more clearly than others. I’ve seen you in my son’s handsome sensitive face as he’s grown. I’ve felt your spirit in his sweetness, his trusting nature. I’ve heard your voice beneath his.

I feel your spirit moving in me when I react with patience and kindness to the fact that he’s not like me, and in fact couldn’t be more like you in many, many ways.

And in loving that in him, in knowing that he might someday tell Susan and I what you told Mom and Dad that terrible afternoon 30 years ago, I’m granted some sort of absolution, a redemption I don’t deserve, in knowing I’ll know how to love him at the moment he’ll need my love the most.

In my dreams I see you rising out of that bloody alleyway on a fountain of radiance like some sort of immortal angel full of fire, full of power, full of light.

-Ghosts, by Michael Rowe

If I do not do as expected, it will have been because I wasn’t good enough.

After you’re done shitting all over my life, can I maybe please have it back?

Yours sincerely,
Me