We thought we were in paradise, you and I, where virgin sands and clean blue skies connect with crystal waters, as though it were a vivid, magic dream, a place untouched by life's imbalances. And heart could sing and voice could shout in melodies unknown to dark and dusty memories; when life smiled through our smiling lips and whispered sweet and fragile sanities which hovered in the wind awhile then spiraled out of sight and mind and reach. We did not hold ourselves to yesterday's gifts of glad and failing life, but reached with life towards growing, blooming things, unfinished rhapsodies, ecstasies in flight, and love untarnished with regret. I know right now, as I look into your dimmed eyes, that what was then can yet revive, can yet reclaim its living flow, its pa**ion and its mystic glow. For love is much too strong a living force to stand behind the rigid wall we made and dwell there, there amidst neglected hope and half-starved dreams, abandoned touch and
silence full of muffled wailing. Like you, I don't know when the road turned dark or where the path turned crooked and ran into the weed and brush of apathy. And I shall not ask why. It is enough to see the light, though dim, is still alive and flickers in your eyes, so beautiful, so sad. For one small spark is all we need to build the raging flame which makes us live and love and run through flower spotted fields of joy like children wild and free. This time it shall be different. For I will watch and wait and lovingly guard the flaming torch and will not fall asleep and float somewhere beyond this moment of our living, of our lives. No. I will tend our love as a shepherd tends his flock or a bird its fragile, flightless young. And though we each shall change according to the movement of life's growth, we shall not grow outside each other's loving shadow. For though two eagles sometimes fly apart, they never fly beyond each other's sound, each other's sight.