Requiem

Portent comes in many forms.  A courageous girl with footsteps of glass, or a thoughtful boy alone at the ivory.  Trying to pick a lock of eighty-eight keys.  The lock of a thousand stars.  I've seen that kind of wonder held in the palm of angels far brighter than myself.  Angels of mortal provenance suspended in the place between fable and heartbreak.  Remembrance, as the true healers of lost Roma believed.  To be loved, to be seen for the wild and wilderness that we are.  Each of us.  To close your eyes when your beloved does.  To close your eyes to the entire universe, only to open them in union.  Or as close to union as a heart can venture.  I've walked beside each of you.  The winged unseen.  Bright Star.  The men and women we become.  The lost children we’ve always been, and are still trying so desperately to protect.  Blessed ones, it's not my place to guide your hands across the ivory or the fret.  Nor my place to tell you what melodies mean. My place is simple compliment, never claim.  I only listen, staggered by the grace I find in those places where diligence meets spontaneity.  Places where my friends truly bloom.  Those fields and keys of lavender where I am humbled, gladdened and taught.  Like a kiss poised so earnest and delicate in the reign of rising light.  That's real study, I think.  True scholarship.  To be moved by the work of your friends, both cherished and unmet.  If I were any kind of angel worth his salt I would reach for those kinds of footsteps and that kind of thoughtfulness.  Each day I would pray and pledge to know more of those courageous hands in mine, half-hidden though they seem.  To earn respite from this loneliness.  To truly earn the kiss, or the kind word.  There is no greater grace than a heart that wants to lift you; a heart that remembers you always.