Cleaning out my closet the other day I found a stack of old concert posters I’ve collected throughout the years. A signed Amy Grant, limited edition Dave Matthew’s prints, Tyrone Wells wrote my name with a heart on every poster he ever signed, a sketch of a boy … what is this doing here? Was not expected to see that.
I picked up the pile with his face on top, walked over to my bed, and sat down with a memory, for just a minute, then went about the chores I had set out to accomplish.

Thing is, I don’t know what to do with this now. Every day, he rests in the corner of my room, breathless, frozen in time.

It must have been meant for me, this priceless faded yellow paper with a pencil shaded jawline, eyes, lips from some worn out memories of years ago. This is how I remember him, this. He belongs to another life, now, to another family, to another soul with hope in her heart, yet. This boy – this. Was my dream, once. This was My Love.

I could never own him, never change him, never enslave him into a life he did not want, and I wouldn’t want to, but I can have this single piece of paper a stranger drew before that boy ever saw my face. Before one more cup of coffee, before a sugar packet, before… as if that stranger held the key to this moment in some distant future, believing it would end up with me over a thousand miles and three lives later, that I would need this – to remember.

Maybe anyone else would just throw it away. Stuff it back on some dusty shelf where things go to be forgotten. Hide it between pages of a book, folded, amongst the words of all the love stories we’ll never write.

Life has moved forward and I too with it, I am not quite the same as I was when his breathes said my name, I accept the defeat and have built up where foundations crumbled, and I’ve chosen to be happy though it meant I lost so much. He was never mine, I was never his, possessions masked as partnership, no. We were passing clouds on a Summer morning, casting beautiful shadows on the earth below, and for a time my heart could fly. As much as I’ve understood over the years, as much as I’ve learned and grown, it seems more a gift than a tragedy, to have loved and let it go.
I do.
… I do.

But I’ll never let this page dissappear, I’ll never forget those years when I blossomed, the catalyst for knowing what love is and is not, for the rest of my life it is written here without words. In the grey shaded eyes, in the way I remember him, this boy in a drawing that made its way to my home in another life.

I’ve had many mysteries unfold and I’ve seen some serendipity, yet to just go through old things and find this unexpectedly, brings a smile to my weary soul, knowing years had passed and somehow, this dream was still meant to be my own.