Empathy

I am not all happiness. I am not as bitter as your smile and I have no lips to make me sense - to curve around my name and give me more depth than the air, than the dust I rise from like the moon, night after night chasing sunlight across the sky. I am the antediluvian scrap of flesh in the corner of my grandfather's eye. When he laughs, I feel myself folding with him into my own skin, into the held-breath slip of sky I inhabit, into this airless gap of eternity where we live solemn together, my body like an accordion and his skin crinkling with all the mirth of his years seasoned with every war he encountered and the salt that scarred welts into his corneas time and time again. He touches my face, and I purple with the bruises the sun inflicted on the flaking-parchment knowledge of his skin. We are love. We are birthday-cake candles half blown out before the wish has time to develop. We are hand-in-hand soldiers and accidental splotches of red, blood on lovers' lips. We are a pattern woven through history, sporadic and relentless and beautific in inevitability. And so we smile for each other, secretive and mournful and gloriously wise, and we laugh at words that have yet to materialize. **For my Grandpa Clyde... your stories always made me sad and happy at the same time. I longed for adventure like yours, and I ached for the pain you had to go through, and I loved and love you very much. I hope you never feel lonely again.