For Awhile

It is like the air tastes different...not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that implies an absence.  A piece not included...a hole. 

For awhile it was simple, as achingly easy as a morning wobbling like a toddler to get up, light a yellow sun and drag it across the sky until smashing it on the other side into bits of orange and pink.

It is not emptiness, because the day looks exactly the same as before.

It is not abandon...it is nothing like that.

The rope tire swing simply frays, once-strong chords straining, yielding, undoing...that place in a summer when there wasn't anything else...anybody else...except the both of them.

The rope... one day...
one strand, slowly unveiling and unwinding...not even a snap when it lets go but rather a simple string that breaks soundlessly...a tire slowly rolling away from a tree.  It's not absent.  The piece parts are there...the rope now hanging, still tied to the tree...the tire feet away. 
But damn is it broken.

For awhile though it wasn't.  For awhile it was timeless, effortless.  For awhile it felt just like breathing.

Now nobody has fixed the rope swing and nobody has moved the tire.  Summer is now a hot pale haze and spiders lay eggs in the darkened places of the tree. 

But it is a lovely view that remains, when there wasn't absence but presence.  When the day was occupied by a laugh, a brief word...a glimpse.  And held me there, not caring about the other hours, the other minutes. 

For awhile.

But not now, where my heart lies scattered beneath that rope swing like a sun-scorched tire, blackened by time.