No Reply

There are faces that stare out of an inner dark that are featureless and have no name. They haunt memory, some prodding a nerve sending a regret off in search of a home. Others pick at a wound not quite healed somewhere in a hard to reach place of a life. There are those faces that are lost somewhere, trapped in a moment, unable to move on. I never saw your face, your brief existence covered over by a label wearing the anonymity of just a surname. That was the way they did it back then, stopper grief with denial. Your lifetime was measured in minutes. You would be forty five this year. My mind often fills those years with dream, wondering what we could have done, the meaningful and silly stuff a father usually does with a son. There is a place I sometimes go to stare into the face of an unfathomable silence. I whisper a name but there is no reply.