Teacher

I am who I am though much changed since. Could compare a life to the changing seasons like the summer heat that dies fast in the bite of October air, or the colder December winds. And very little time passes. Hearing the song softer now, I remember how it was then. The days and smallest moments that carved both painful and painfully beautiful scars into the easiest of memories. Like films of dust that cover everything not often used, but waiting. And to think about what should’ve been, between the lazy distance both too far gone and almost nothing but a short coming home to find it just as it was, only touched by the dust of a few years, Is useless. Just as it was then, when it was us and a boy we all knew, (or thought we knew the kind) his awkward form sitting tall with a measured confidence that knew we were watching, (and using him for another good time) and still seemed easy enough on the surface to show us he was like the rest of us- A child like us. Fighting and claiming and fighting the uncontained wisdom of children. But he, ahead of his time, got up from his desk and painted his own stairway to heaven and we watched while he climbed. Believing that he was old enough and wise enough to measure speed and resistance. That that would be enough to maintain the strongest and most fragile of us. But instead, as we walked silently between the pews he taught us something useful.