Your fragrance often wafts into my head guided by the metaphysical pinings of two souls and the bond between spirits not tethered to temporal moorings. Mortal boundaries span six feet of earthly separation but the heavenly plane exists within our senses. Comforting, that thought, and breathing your scent brings thoughts of your heaven wafting through my mind.

For heaven is where you took me taking time and care to prepare me for that which was yet to come. And in the well-spent space of our brief existence, the world was ours to shape and share, yours and mine, two worlds between us–I was happy to let your excitement take me there. Your world: where I rarely lit upon the ground when shining above the clouds, and where your heart became the master of my own. And when your fingers gathered mine into your hand, your hand of strength, and warmth, and tenderness, and drew me to your breast, I found a finely feathered home, a secure and comforting nest.

The bursting fire of our glory all too short and not yet spent by far, we parted much too soon. And then I found no amount of preparation could prepare a soul for the loss of half his heart, for a heart beats twice to count as one, and one and one make two. And now at night, I count the beats but all I feel is one…one…one.

You are always there, if just beyond the edge of thought. But in that place where souls from blemished bodies bid for rest, where pain becomes an indifferent term unknown below the plane of consciousness, you watch and wait and send to me in time of hidden need a waft of you, a sprig of spice you sprinkle upon a grieving soul, an orange blossom’s fragrance to soothe my mind until I awaken to you.

Sometimes when waking to your scent I smile, half-expecting to see you walking toward me (walking, for I cannot recall you break into a run (how gauche)); sometimes my eyes turn soft, obscured, when I remember you’re too far away for that to happen. And soon the fragrance drifts and fades as I set aside the moist of that diaphanous bubble of joy, but the memory of your scent remains a tangible presence buried just below the plane of our consciousness.

Sometimes, I think, the dead stop is the hardest part to bear, that sudden movement when your fragrance disappears, the dream dissolves, and I awaken to a heart beating one…one…one.

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