Beautiful Boy

There's a brilliant ray of unadulterated happiness coming from the little boy's eyes, from his smile, from his entire countenance. "It's a miracle!" a voice inside me cries. Live and let live, says the music.

It's funny where you can find that. I can find it on the air, in a child's eyes, in a melody. But most of all I find it in other people who have lived through it already--the virgin bliss that seeps into the space around them for the joy of existing. He cries in every motion, in every breath between the lines "I am alive and glad."

His eyes are like mine, I think--not surprised at anything, both child and adult wrapped into one. Too bad there's so much distance, because I truly want to match that gaze more often. I suppose frequency will never be and infrequency will have to suffice. A laugh is escaping me now and I can't help but smile anyhow. But he'd gladly trade lives with me. Gladly. I don't know if I'd like his as opposed to my own but I do know that I'd like to share it more. Maybe I'm luckier than i make myself out to be--especially for myself. I've found another someone who, if he were nearer and closer, perhaps would provide another mirror for my eyes, another fountain of Madness, another full moon for this Inky tide of mine, another connection. One other I've found and now distance separates us, too.

But he looks so young, feels so young to me. how could I give myself up like that? So quickly? So artificially--it's the same with both of them. But this one is Berekiah in my own world--your world, too--with a decade more life than I.

I told him once that I don't understand how it's possible for me to pour myself into someone after only having met once. How it's possible to feel that immediate click. He said there is no reason, nor a need for one--I opened up and he reciprocated. I asked why--no explanation. He knows, too. I am a Friend. And if it were possible, he'd drop everything and come four hours to see me for two, and then go back again. He'd come just to go back again.

But life gets in the way.

I'd do the same, but circumstance is the same for me, too. So I'll avoid 2 a.m. because that's where my life leads and I revolve around no one. But maybe--maybe when the shift ends and the city pretends to sleep--I'll be waiting for that second Friend. Maybe I'll be waiting for that Friend, whose eyes reflect my own over that decade I've not yet lived--will never live--over that decade we both understand doesn't matter because eternity is a moment and makes up for lost time.