For her...

This isnt actually my writing. This was written for me by my friend Jim soon after my friend Stef passed away.

The Day You Didn’t Wake Up
---Dedicated to Stefanie Blackburn

We first met on the day you didn’t wake up.
A sun-drenched January afternoon,
Cold and beautiful like the one before it.
Living fifty feet from each other,
Never a word was passed
And on the day you didn’t wake up,
We didn’t change that fact.

Bitter smell of frozen youth filled my lungs
In a room where the silence was heartbreaking.
I held your icy cheek in hand
As the 911 operator recited monotone orders,
But she couldn’t see this.
Amber hair flowed motionless pass
A pair of baby blues that never seemed so sad.

On the day you didn’t wake up,
You left to the beat of breaking concrete.
Tears raining down like meteors from three stories above.
Slamming through dark stretcher tracks.
The only luggage loaded into that van,
Was a maroon carry-on in your image.

How do you eulogize someone you only met once?
I couldn’t tell ya but I tried to figure it out.
On my kitchen floor for hours,
Shaking hands scribbled words
On paper that blurred with every line,
That blurred with every letter,
That blurred with every passing moment.

On the day you didn’t wake up
I wrote a poem for you
In the hopes that some how
These words might leap from paper
And transcend comprehension of life and death.
That they rearranged themselves into concentrated light
Reaching places un-thought of by men or women,
Just to say that I may not have known you,
But meet me at the gates
On the day I don’t wake up.
We will talk of that cold and beautiful January afternoon
Where the sun had never been brighter
And when we met for the first time.

Finding Peace

Peace.
I feel her creeping up my body and warming my chest.
The feeling is so lovingly threading a needle,
with the strongest of apologetic regret she has.
She gathers up all the splintered pieces
and touches their jagged edges,
one by one,
angle by sharp angle,
until her soothing brush calms their burning sadness.

She ever so gently takes them into her experienced hand
and holds them.
Just holds them.
Nothing fancy. Nothing extreme.
Just holds them.
She listens to them.
Listens as their every tear hits the ground
and their every shudder rocks through their being.

The she tells them that it's enough.
She's held them so close to her own intake,
her own outtake,
that they stop torturing themselves.
They learn to breathe again.
They learn to live again.
She proves it's possible.

She doesn’t lie.
She makes sure they understand that it will hurt.
The recovery will be long and difficult,
but it will be possible.

When they are ready,
the tiny pieces of my shattered heart hold together.
they grasp each other with a strength
they thought they had lost.

While she runs her thread through them,
They cry.
They whimper.
They smile.
They know that these stitches will leave scars.
These stitches will bruise.
But these stitches will hold.
They will hold while the cracks of betrayal still show.
They will hold while the old drips away.
While the past that was once so destroyed
is taken over by a future that holds forgiveness.

These stitches will heal them.
No more broken.
No more bleeding.
No more pain.
Only thin lines that remind me
that I am still alive.
Because when she is gone,
that’s the only way to really find her.
Peace.