Just Tonight?

The relationship between beauty and fragility is no big secret. No big epiphany, no big necessary explanation, and no big deal really. Though it’s amazing how often it crops up, and how seldom I reflect on it…tonight being an exception to that, in one of the few sets of quiet morning hours at the ends of another summer’s free fall. August; die she must. Like the room Winston and Julia used to tryst in– after she told him she loved him– before they were torn from it and brainwashed away from one another. Like life itself, cosmically speaking– a breeze on a hot day, a hand on your shoulder asking you to say (just tonight). Like you. Like me. Like the fourth of July, 1993. Like inspiration on the heels of the smallest little thing. Like everything worth anything. just a glimpse of it on the bank of the river, and a memory of it around the bend. How many I’ve seen– how many we’ve all seen– and how many I’ve only heard of. Knew a boy once, for a spell; summer, a real hot one, not at all like this one. Sandy blonde kid with a horsey jaw and over-sized shoulder blades. He looked up to me, though I’ve no idea why. Full of smiles and the positives that one was, though he had a soft romantic sensitive side underneath all of that. I rode him kind of hard, from time to time, and often feel like I let him down. I think about him sometimes, and I wonder if he has the slightest clue that I do, wherever he is.