Charcoal

The way she spoke about him was like drawing with charcoal.  

Dark but hauntingly beautiful.  

Sharp lines that smeared into smooth patches and blended into everything around.  

Sometimes, it was a rough sketch, but there was depth, there were shadows, there were lighter spots amid the darkness.  

That’s the way she talked about it and that’s how he felt to her; like a vague outline with enough potency to stain her soul.  

Rough edges that you could smooth out with the right brush of a finger.  

His charcoal darkness stained her the minute she reached out, and she was never clean of him again.

Absent Prince

Can you imagine a fairy-tale where prince charming is everything he’s supposed to be?

Can you imagine his beauty, inside and out?

His valor, his courage, his righteousness, his justness?

His smile like sunshine and his eyes like precious stones?

His gleaming armor and his battle ready sword and his wisdom like a crown upon his head?

Can you image him being everything the stories always said he would be?

And then looking up to realize, he’s not there when the castle is burning and the dragon is attacking and the world is falling apart?

Can you imagine that sometimes, it doesn’t matter how beautiful his smile or his soul is, because he didn’t show up to the fight?

Sea and Sky

It's been far too long since I last laid my eyes upon the sea.
My skin craves the graze of salt water on cheeks and feet and shoulders.
My lungs beg for the crisp, stinging freedom of the open air, fresh and unpolluted by the land.
I need to lay out under the stars with the sand beneath me and listen to the unbridled ferocity of nature in the lapping waves upon the silent shore.
I need to look up into heaven and count the stars and search for planets while I whisper your name and our stories into the atmosphere.
And what I need, more than all of that, is for you to lie beside me while your hand weighs mine down or I might just drift away into the night sky.

Words like Fingerprints

Our words, like fingerprints, press against the air between us.

Each unique, but somehow made for one another.

Secrets and memories reach through time and space, holding us together.

Two strangers each looking and finding a mirror in the other.

Despite the distance, the air between us is heavy.

Full of late night conversations we never meant to have.

Weighed down by secrets slipping out of sleepy mouths.

"I know you" both hearts seem to say.

"I have seen what you have seen.  I have ached how you now ache."

At twilight, and at dawn, the hearts break over the space between them.

We promise them, soon, and then we delay.

Everyday making them beat more in sync and yet,

Everyday putting a few more steps between them.