Thinking About Bygone Days

I wrote this tonight because I was thinking about something from the past.  Not with a longing for it to return, you understand, but just sort of taking it out and tumbling it around in my hand like an old photograph, a curiosity from years over and done with.  This is the product of that musing.  

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I knew from the first time I saw you that there was something, even before I knew who you were, what you were…. I came laughing into the makeshift dojo for the first time, wobbling on polished hardwood as I tried to slip off my shoes with wet feet, and you looked up.  I felt it like a physical blow, even as I saw you hesitate in midstrike before bringing the shinai across your opponent’s do. 

And I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing I always do.  I ran like hell.  I put up a wall.  I ignored you as hard as I could.  I was distant and polite.  Nothing as beautiful as you could ever belong to me.  

Imagine my surprise when you ran also.  Not away in the opposite direction as I’d expected but in pursuit. 

And what a subtle creature you were with that chase.  You moved slow, stealthy, a big cat stalking something timid and easily startled.  And the next thing I knew, we were there in the moonlight and you were leaning in the window of that old Jeep telling me that you thought I was beautiful, too.

It all ended in ashes, in pain, in lies.  Maybe it had to.  Maybe nothing that starts out with something that strikes like a clean sharp blade can ever do anything but leave a bleeding body in its wake.  In those ashes, however, there will always be one or two moments that shine like diamonds, something left unconsumed.  There will always be you and me in the moonlight, both of us beautiful, if only for that one brief moment before the clouds appeared and everything was darkness again.