Phantoms

I closed my eyes a bit ago to pray yet one more time for my dear lost friend, and I found myself crying and thinking over all the changes in my life in the last two years. It's hard to believe that November 16th is nearly here again. It's even harder to believe that the date still matters to me. I don't know exactly why it still does. The reason only seems clear to me in those dark three-o'clock-in-the-morning times.

I've been reading my darling Lucy Maud again. The "Anne" books I can do without, but those three little novels about Emily of New Moon - those will always be on my heart. She waited years, and she got what she wanted in the end, even though it seemed like her dreams were dead forever. I've read those books a dozen times in the last fifteen years, and I always cry when she and Teddy finally come together at the end of the last book.

Isn't fiction a pretty thing? The heroine always gets her heart's desire, and the rest of the world goes on around them like it always had. It's too bad that real life is not as romantic. More often than not, dreams are unrealistic things that eventually die without ever having been realized. And the world does goes on, dead dreams or no.

Two years and countless prayers later, a single phantom continues to haunt my days and nights. But perhaps, after all, not everything that is gained from someone who is lost is lost as well. Perhaps each song, each scar, is a mark that tells a story forever. To banish a memory is to banish a part of who we were. At least this is what my phantom tells me.

H