Just Holding On

It didn’t take long to love you.

All I had to do was look your way before everything good and pure within me catapulted this soul forward, forever leading me backwards to that moment when your gentle brown eyes let me know it was safe to drown.

And so, I did.

There have been many regrets to count thus far, but you have never made the list. That summer I turned 16 with you became the backdrop of my life with which to measure every ounce of love that came my way.

It still manages to echo today, like music within a chamber, leaving words like a song upon my skin.

Closing my eyes, I feel the touch of your fingers laced with mine, the sweetness of forbidden kisses and the beautiful innocence of untarnished love.

I flush.

It was the summer of 1977 and even then, I knew we were the lucky ones. Standing between the sun and moon, running through fields of wildflowers.

Covered by the stars; aligned.

Over 40 years ago there was no questioning tomorrow and I still remember how it felt to be rooted, yet free, on those dirt roads of childhood when it was easier to believe in everything beautiful.

Today, older and wise enough, I see life's truth is strange and wonderous all at once.

Every action, every look, every choice takes us to places of the heart we may never have wandered upon if we were left to calculate our own lives and even the best laid plans contain interrupted moments.

Hard or soft, they do not skip the years, nor age.

We were no exception and no amount of struggle against an unfair agenda would allow us to control a future that was so far away.

A dirt road will always cross another path.

How could we have known this was our introduction to the very places where the good stuff lay; hidden in and out of relationships and the dusty corners of years?

There are lessons on the beauty of love, the pain of death, the joy of success and the empathy of loss which are necessary to move and shape one’s heart. Not to merely survive but understand how to live.

It all stood in the shadows of our youth, waiting, while we were unaware.

If not for those unexpected moments of fate that change us, just enough, to highlight parts of our story with color against the black and white pages of an ordinary life, who would we be?

All these years you have stayed woven within my words, just inside the margin of my days. A poetic reminder that some come along offering up gifts we simply were not meant to understand in the dawn of youth, only to leave us a better person as our seasons roll on.

And I wonder if you know when the sun goes down, when I close my tired eyes on yet another summer gone, that you can often find me waiting outside your door?

It is true.

It is always still, always dark. Like ink.

Somehow, I am not quite sure the door is attached to the house at all. When I knock, although gently, I'm surrounded by the spirit of a past that envelopes my being like a moment of grace, flooded in light from above.

All that I am, exposed.

I hold my breath as the door slowly opens to frame you standing there. Tall, lanky, in overalls. Both hands in your pockets with that flop of sandy hair across one eye, the other softly looking out at me while yesterday comes into focus.

In the slowness of your smile, I am young once more.

Yearning for you to hear my voice, I pray my whisper carries across the portal. But like a silent movie, I already know there is no sound; only the imagined creaking of hinges trying to close the space between us with a sudden sharpness that I know, could I actually hear, would shake me to the core.

And I awake.

To streaks of sunlight dancing across the wooden floorboards beside my bed, to the quiet of this room where I lay sandwiched amongst thick cotton sheets, my days numbered.

I watch the dancing subside as the sun melts down, turning myself to that mirror on the wall; searching for the girl I used to be.

Past fading blue eyes surrounded by silver; I see her, still.

In every line, every part of her face that gathers like a quilt, holding on to pieces of a bygone era. Of sweet surrender, love songs and forbidden Michelob beer.

I see her in Ferris Wheels, ice cream and summer swims.

I see her in Cracker Jack boxes, promise rings, motorcycles and laughter in the wind.

I see her in every young couple that shines with the promise and hope of tomorrow.

I always see her. I always see you.

Somewhere in time it is summer 1977 and the greater world swirls around us.

Back there in our town, you and I can see no end.

We are just holding on.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed my last book "If I Saw You on Sunday" which was a fundraiser for a school in Mexico, I am currently working towards another book of my collective writings and have joined Vocal to help with the cost.

If you enjoyed the story enough to feel like adding to the "Tip" jar for my next endeavor, thank you & know I am ever grateful :)

I hope you will join me for more stories along the way. You can sign up for free with your email to receive story notifications!

Salud!