Childhood Sweetheart
It was a warm summer's evening spent strolling along the Rue Morgue
when I saw her first. She was walking the other way, her footsteps
playing a song, the movement of her walk a ballet which seemed meant
for me alone.
Strangled accusations and vapid half truths were the sum of my more
recent experience of womankind, but she was tangibly different. It
brought to mind visions of a lost and forsaken childhood, events
acknowledged as having happened on a level of detachment that
precluded any feeling that once I was there, as though it had happened
to another me.
Many years have passed, but still I remember her face, her smile. I
remember when in class we would seek another glimpse of one another,
fleeting and fragile, each more precious for its transience, never
acknowledging that contact but knowing the reason just the same.
The day I knew she felt the same, emotion welled within me so strongly
that I could hardly breathe. Like an angel who cast her shine upon a
misguided Lucifer, her light was borne in my heart.
That heart was broken when they took me to another place, one not so
far in distance but destined to become further away in memory, my
longing breaking my spirit. My cruel captors, thinking I was too
young to know how to feel, they broke the umbilical cord and severed
all connexion to the life I had known. Meanwhile, I knew that I would
not be the one to share her first kiss, her smile never again to cast
its sunshine on my soul.
I cried for days for my lost angel, and even now I still wonder what
might have been.