A Letter

J, 

If ever I could find a way, should find a way, to express precisely how I feel about you—in every variation and complication—it would be in a song. I would not have a voice in it, nor even a part with instrument. In fact, I would be completely, silently within it. Not separated—simply a part of the vibration, the atmosphere of it all. 

You would see my small, slender hands with cherry blossom fingertips gently orbiting the notes. You would feel the circles of blue, my eyes, linger on a corner of your cheeks as you spectate carefully. You would watch as each note in a procession, spinning softly as a mobile, succeeds one another sadly. You would sense it all, every part of sadness, confusion, anger and admiration, if you carried it with you. 

Yet, the song is so much more than even that. 

It was writing on the beach two summers ago. 

It was a melting orange seeping far into a cave of green. 

It was the smell of smooth paper and a smudge of ink on my fingers. 

It was red, it was all red. 

It was sitting on the porch reading in the early yellow sun of spring. 

It was a hope. 

It was a sadness. 

It was a lovely poem shortened by a torn page. 

—

This song for you, for me, would begin with soft orange light that graduates into a red radiating with a pulse of life and finish exactly the way autumn comes—with a farewell, personal and cutting to summer. Replacing all instead with a somber sense of peace. 

Last comes a reckoning of responsible promise and onward as the only place left to walk toward. 

A note falters; the orange light settles in. 

Summer songs begin elsewhere. 

—K

Sept. 2018