A Letter to My Lost Loves

Will you be my forever,

Will you be my light?

Shall we walk along the river

Hand in hand all night?

When I was 12, my best-friend tried to keep pace, waving as lovers do in slow-motion movie scenes, as our car slowly backed away from my childhood, forever. And I left behind the alphabets in three languages, and numbers, the basketball court that I had never liked anyway, and half my heart.

I brought with me memorized phone numbers, and pin codes and promises to keep on a dark snowy road in a bright, hot country.

 No wonder they melted.

Later, I would learn of the road not taken and ponder on the what-ifs, but that was many many years after love had taken my hand again, when I had forgotten to be surprised even by the absence of pain.

Sometimes I try recalling that 12 year old, to touch some part of that bereaved solitude crying in silence in a class of strangers. Where has she gone? Among my decades old accumulated paperwork, there is an old handwritten essay about visiting old friends. Someone must have bled writing that. Was it my blood? But don’t human blood cells die in 100 days or so? And I can’t touch that sorrow, and I can’t recognize that lament, and all that remains of that exuberant pain are shapes of words in a feeble inky scrawl.

But that memory remains, of a farewell wave, a brave smile, and childish games… a lost Eden.

And Eden would return many times, and my heart, shattering with every fall would nevertheless surprise me by loving again. And again. And again.

And this I tell you, my love- that every love has its time and space. And it matters not whether you leave first or I, or who bleeds more, or a little longer, as long as we love true in our allotted time.

My house in Budapest
My hidden treasure chest
Golden grand piano
My beautiful Castillo

You
You
I'd leave it all

                     -Budapest, George Ezra