The years had passed the way that they do, abrupt, yet imperceptible, a channel of memories binding the days between like guitar strings, tense and quick to vibrate with each touch. She had offered herself once more, trusting life, like a child holding the hand of a mother among the crowd. Loss turned dull, names and faces hazed with each morning coffee, the days behind dimming like afternoon sunlight, spectral and irrelevant. She, too, had become a fissure of memory, a name mentioned in passing, like the lyrics we forget from songs we once loved. The self renewed itself as naturally as seasons, the days rolled by like waves, each reaching the shore by the thrust of another. Again, life had become better; she had found peace, she knew, her mug resting on the windowsill, the morning breeze seducing the rising steam in a dance. Yet sometimes, like a distant tune, she could hear the plucking of another time, days that once burned like stones around the fire, and she would wonder what it was all for, what it means to know that there are people one will love forever, and never see again.

LBCH