The Other

It is always there, never quite within range where the mind can snare some shadowy form, or shape an outline and hold it long enough to name. It waits for the sun to go down and the evening to draw in like a taken breath when it comes closer and nestles into what warmth lingers there under the folds of a gathered dark. Sometimes when I am off elsewhere and far away in thought, I am sure it slips inside my head and enters where memories are, trying on a face, posing in some familiar scene, rummaging through what a child left there long ago as if it was searching for itself. And there are mornings when waking I sense its presence in the dissolving residue of a dream, a small footprint left on that shore between awareness and sleep, an indent, a scooped out hole where something broken took refuge and sought comfort in being near. There are dark times when it almost becomes a plumbed in part of me, each bunkered in our own adjoining rooms, held apart by a wall neither of us want to breach. We have spent a good part of our lives here, holding onto what should be set free, fearing that if we did, one of us would cease to be.