.24) Forever

Sweet summers we stayed outdoors till we could no longer tell the trees from the dark between them and a brigade of fireflies had failed in its quest to prolong the day. We had a name for daylight’s stopping time in a slow embrace of farewell, a kind reprieve to our outdoor games till the moment night’s blanket covered the last of earth’s cradle, and the blanket came alive with singing: that name was forever. We never spoke the name, but we knew— Our minds were filled with forever. Forever was also how long my friend and I had known each other—we stood by the trunk of the big tree in his front yard trying to remember when we’d met, struggling to give a name to a stretch of the rolling river of Time, but such thoughts flooded the beds of our minds. All origins lay dim in memory’s forest: “two years ago”, we murmured, but that was just another name for forever. Ah, that child’s “forever” turned out to be a comet speeding through the vaster firmament of our allotted days.