I Wish I Could Spend One More Sunset With You
-Bea C. Pilotin
Photo by: @Jesus Kiteque
The good thing about blank sheets of paper is that, it has a capacity to be whatever it is meant to be- a poem, a photo, an old- fashioned love letter, just a simple word or a story. There are no rules. But behind these words, there’s a spectral presence of pain that marks in every corner of one’s heart.
The sound of my laptop sings out with a deafening silence in my room, coffee in my favorite mug to the edge of my table, a few steps away on my bed. My face is so intense; my eyes are squinting at what I am writing- letting my fingers fly on the keyboard.
I lost count of how many times I stopped and started writing the words from the bottom of my heart. Just the thought that you suffered in one moment and vanished gives me the pain I couldn’t explain. Hot tears begin their exodus, making their slow way down my face.
I didn’t tell how much I love you but I know that you felt my love in countless ways.
Yes, I once stood at the side of a casket. Flowers were draped everywhere. Death. I have never known this word before. I couldn’t believe that you abandoned us even in death. You took yourself off permanently somewhere, where you’re safe and nobody would be able to find and harm you again. Death. There is no closure at all. There are no answers to all the questions even how many times I replay the conversations over and over again. When I close my eyes, I hear voices and smell the aromas of coffee. They’re instant replays but are just memories. If only I could press a button and delete the whole segment of death, re-arrange the entire sequences and edit the event. If only I could freeze frames. But how inconsiderate life is! It teaches me how to deal with everything including your death.
From dust to dust and you’re gone.
I gave myself the permission to cry and brought the pain to God. It has been years but it’s nothing compared to eternity and indescribable sorrow and pain become my constant companion even after all this time. Your absence is not only an absence, it is an infinite loss for me.
Goodbye is a word that until now I refuse to say. Because saying it, I know, is the most heartbreaking life’s reality and just by the mere utterance of it, can leave a remarkable endless sighing.
It’s true what Collete have quoted that Danielle Steel added to her ‘Remembrance’- “A tomb is just only an empty box.” And the one I love exist entirely in my memory, in a handkerchief that’s still scented when I unfold it, in an intonation that I suddenly remember and listen to for a whole long moment, my head bent…
…and what bitterness at first- but what calm relief later! To discover, one day when winter trembles with cold, uneasiness and hope- that nothing has changed: neither the smell of the earth, nor the quiver of the brook, nor the shape like rosebuds, of the chestnut shoots…to lean down in astonishment over the little filigree cups of the wild anemones, toward the carpet of endless violets- are they mauve, are they blue? To let one’s gaze caress the unforgotten outline of the mountains, to drink with a sigh of hesitation the piquant wine of a new sun…to live again.
To a dearest brother up there:
You broke my heart. You left a wound in it that strike at my soul. The pain in my heart didn’t go away and it became a part of me. As I’ve said, it’s been years and time didn’t do its work because the spaces between the times I miss you grow longer every day. It sucks that I miss you like this; an ember still smolders inside me. I know, that’s how things go sometimes. We do not get to choose the events that come our way and the agonies that interrupt our lives. But I hope one day, my heart will be healed. I hope I will not have this strange grief whenever I think of you. I wish a day will come that I’d finally stop screaming the pain of having this colossal hole in my life that gives me an eternal torment and I wish one day I will remember you but without pain.
To you,
I wish I could spend one more sunset with you.
