In spirit, if nothing else

Two years in I still spend hours awake by his heartbeats, guarding them as though they were secrets or irreplaceable artifacts from another century. I fear that if I close my eyes for too long they will fade or disappear altogether, much like cherry blossoms at the height of spring. It happened before to people much more in love than us.

The mother haunts our little intrigues with her absence, I count days upon days and gather evidence of her existence from photo albums and discolored postcards. She speaks to the both of them but in separate paragraphs like chapters in a novel, written as correspondence and therefore hopelessly fragmented.

And still, as he leads me through webs of graphite shadows cast by cedar trees that frame our silence, April seems to end the way it started. Pictures turn to memories and suddenly they're forgotten, as if none of it ever really happened.