Lamb

Imagine you’re in bed. That little old twin bed, back at home. The sheets wrinkled and soft and cool. Your legs clean and strong. Your shoulders sliding down your back, just melting away. Right? Say you’re reading a book. You let it fall a little, into your knees or upon the satin edging of a deep vanilla-colored plush. Cars shushing past outside. You’re just napping in there, just resting and reading, your body recharging. You can barely read the print on the page. The truth is you’ll feel a cold and empty sagging at the bottom of your heart. Everything outside is metal. Your body will feel a little blank. It wants my warm arms and legs beside it, right? It wants our old open sky outside our little bunk room windows. It wants the river and the soft purring of the nightjars perched in the trees, and it wants the wild grass seeds in your hair and in your little white socks. It wants the heat of our little breakfast fire in the mornings, how it warms your chest and the fronts of your arms and shoulders and opens all the pores in your face and repeats itself in your eyes. Fresh breeze cooling your back. The smell of sage and the smell of snow on the wind. Hands wrapped around your little metal cup of instant. You’ll be in your little gray city room, lost to me. A thousand miles away. The little bunks and the barbed wire and the withering bluebonnets gone. And you’ll turn into your pillow and wonder was I ever real? Was it all a dream?

There will be such an awful beauty in your heart. A wound like a seal upon it. It will lie over all the cracked and hard city like a soft, bright-colored film. Your own face overlaid with the face you wore when you were with me in the mountains. A brighter face, a younger face, a soft one that mirrors the weather. You’ll read books—little paperbacks—looking for the kind of sentence that keeps the wound alive. And you must keep it alive. Don’t you ever forget this hurt. Don’t you ever forget what you’ve seen with me. It will save you. You’ll be like an apple tree among all the ash-colored buildings of that granite city. Close your eyes. Turn away from the book in your lap, turn away from the sounds of everyone around you. Take a slow deep breath. Listen. It’s the sound of the wind rushing through the box elder outside our window. It’s the sound of me whispering. I’ll be with you this way.