Touch up

The dusks are starting to pinken...no airline contrails to leave a scratch of white across the evenings...the dark greens beneath the trees are starting to flicker with the yellow blinks of fireflies.

There is a radio somewhere playing...low piano music.  The floorboards set off a familiar groan while I walk from room to room...from the foyer near the front door.  I open it and look out onto the long lane, a slight uphill expanse from the road behind it.  I can remember you walked up at times...and in a current lighting of the sky I can clearly see you...engulfed in the soft yellowing day.  I can remember your walk...your amble...and the way you walked up the stairs onto the porch and into the doorway.

The expanse is darkening now in the twilight...there is no shape or outline of you approaching.  I shut the door...

Beyond the foyer is a small library...it is filled with books.  It is where you and I first started...it has a long wall for the books and a corner fireplace.  It has a loveseat with a lamp...the room smells of old paper and leather...of faint long-ago fires.  It is quite dark in the room, the way we preferred...our quietness with just the split of a wood crackle every now and again.

I move past the library...past a door that is locked...will remain locked forever.  Behind it nothing but destruction and unreconstructed repairs...I move past the door.

The kitchen looks to the west and it is an orange from the sunset in color...blood orange.  It is here where we sat with coffee, quietly enjoying waking to each other.  Tussled hair and pajama bottoms.
The sun rising on the opposite side of the house so the long beams from the front windows pierce in and lay in rectangles across the floor.

It's like you were the daylight itself, moving through the house...warming me.  Sometimes there were storms but so rarely.

And now you have returned outside...only to peer in occasionally.    I invite you in, wish you'd return.

I return to my work in the house, touching up tiny holes in the wall...thinking about your return...covering up the black and restoring the patch to something brand new.