Haunted Still

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She haunted me at first, as if from across the Moors.

I was her Heathcliff, and she the edge-dimmed Catherine of my dreams, lilting through the half-light of my sleeping soul.  I thought of her every moment, waking and non-, and found myself in the red-hot love of 18, too young to know what was happening, too entranced to care.

During our days, the torment of adolescence plodded endlessly on, mind-numbingly slow.  There was hardly the idle second with which to speak a word, barely a moment for an unmonitored glance.  Yet in these moments, when at last they were pilfered like a handful of grain by starving children, we spoke volumes in seconds, and wrote poetry on box tops.

And somehow, despite the constant ebb and flow of opinion, in glorious spite of all well-meaning, thoughtless council to “explore your options” and “guard your heart,” somehow, we rose up flaming and beautiful, with feathers of flame and no trace of ash.

We were young when we started, and most of our friends chose different roads, each following the call of his own inner Piper.  Some have met their destiny along the way, some are still looking.  And we, though willing to trade the wild oat-sowing days of an unanchored youth, have discovered the life we so longed for then, and so treasure now.

And I remain haunted by a wisp of a girl, a mere breath of memory, a reminder: that we were once two, dangling from the edges of our dreams, and now, at last, share the air of the living as one quiet soul.

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