The Soldiering

There is a strange comfort in the point of your life when your face becomes so familiar, catching your reflection becomes a second nature vision of something you've slowly tended to for nineteen years, a unfinished masterpiece, your eyes play to a tune of things that you say you won't do but in a few years, you will.

As we are all constantly changing through a mode of generosity and reproach, forgiveness and forgetfullness I am trying my very best to remember the girl I owe a few very important things. I owe an argument, I owe a reparation, I owe a silent night of windows and rain and dinner with no conversation. I need it to become clear to me, how long I wait. How long I wait for the steady missing to drag me down into a well full of naysayers telling me that the salvation of our friendship is non-negotiable. I say to their nay that we must first acknowledge there are so many loose ends we must committ ourselves to loom together the salvation of eight years a friendship unraveled in one night by third party hands.

And then I remember that with or without you, my chest raises a heaving, breathing breath. With or without you, I hold my jaw a profile to paralell azimuth. With or without you, we both continue as the soldiering, sharing no difference from condemned men.

We could soldier either way.