A lookback on life from beyond the grave: a creative viewpoint

It wasn’t like the movies. The snow fell plainly, without boast of clarity or beauty as the winds carried it along its course. It just… fell. The sun set. Not extravagantly, with purpose or hidden meaning, the light simply left. Hanging up his coat for the long night shift. The footprints in the snow offered nothing more than to remind me of myself. Sitting alone, on a cold winters night. But on this cold winters night my mind, finding itself tired of the drudgery reality offered, construed narrations drawn from some crevice within my still beating heart. Twisting emotion to tell the tale of the snow, the sunset, and of those footprints fading in the night.

The story begins with the dark. Stumbling in a drunken oaf as night fell. With the help of the stars he sets down in the corner by the old chair where love used to stay. Blowing out the candles and drawing the worlds curtains in the form of endless obscurities. Painting with a darkness no one could see. The stars smile at appearances and pretend to submit to them as the earth grows dim. The sky pouring its burden of shadow and silence into it. But as I sat there, staring at the footprints you left, love became an element of that silence and the agony of that sky. Clung to, enraptured and perhaps even imprisoned within the confines of my heart now left only with the hope of what could have been. I sat there hoping in the past, my mind drawing your face on all the empty faces that passed me by. I sat there hoping that somehow, somehow I could go back and change all the times I stood frozen in place before you. Offering nothing more than bouquets of silence. I wish I could go back and break the memory that caught my words and lulled them to sleep. I guess I feared saying too much. I guess I knew I could never say enough. Maybe I don’t deserve the chance, maybe I should move on despite the cascade of cancerous feelings threatening to burst open my chest. I should. But how can I ever abandon you without abandoning myself? I guess I… My mind pushes pause on its narrative. Sensing something familiar in the crisp morning air as the dark falls from Love’s chair to birth the sunrise.

It isn’t like the movies. It’s so much more. The cobwebs spun by your tangled memory are brushed away as the faces that used to pass me by became one. I look up and see you. Just standing there, motionless as snowflakes form a crown around you. You’re silent, nothing so much as a whisper escapes your lips yet I hear the words that my heart would break to sing. So I stand and look at my girl. My entire world. I hear your satin voice compose notes that sends shivers down my spine as I desperately try to find the harmony. I must find it for I have nothing to lose except everything you are. There, something. I grasp at it but it slips through my fingers and not over my tongue. I could not hold it. I could not tear down my emotions to produce the clarity that would finally reach you. I want to love you but I don’t know how anymore. I drop to my knees, the emptiness far too heavy for my aching heart to hold. My stinging eyes water the soil hoping the earth will wake from its slumber and smother your voice still singing as silence in my mind. I stand. Compose myself. And then compose my words to into a three word song singing the only truth I have ever truly known. I sing it over and over and over again as I lay roses down at your grave, brush the crown of snowflakes from the tombstone and retrace my footsteps in the snow.