And Yet…..Hope

This is another prose piece that is inspired because of right now, I have no clue why….

He stood upon the snowy field, not a single sign of the farmland in sight, only white with a fringe of trees on the distant horizon. He stood with azure eyes upturned to the clouds that meandered slowly by. He stood and smiled for a moment, a single flake falling from somewhere up above, a flake loosed by heaven. “I’m here,” he said. “Just stopped by to thank you after all this time. Sorry it’s been so long but you know how it is…” he trailed off and looked regretfully to the ground. “At least, I wish you knew how it was. People die every day down here and only the closest few notice one more missing from the world, but I noticed you. I wonder if you were different from all the others, maybe a little more important, I think you were. You made me who I am now, no one else, not my parents, not the teachers or the professors or my colleagues, not a single other friend; you were the sole hand that guided me. God must be a writer, or at least likes to read, because he sure knows irony,” he said smiling through the sadness. “You came to me to make you great, to help you battle all those problems holding you back from an almost limitless world, and I failed. You wanted to write but didn’t have the language, I could write but didn’t have the nerve. Instead of me passing on my skills so that you could succeed, you thrust me kicking and screaming past all the self-made boundaries, to a place where I discovered myself. And you died before I could ever repay you. So what now? How do I ever pay back what I owe? Even now with all the things I know, all the things I”ve learned over the years since your death, I still don’t have an answer. I hope that telling the world about you, your story, your life, your beauty, will perhaps make amends for my failure. You should see it, it’s a masterpiece. It’s more beautiful than anything man has ever seen-the way the words flow together. And I didn’t even need to try, your life was just too beautiful to ever seem ugly.” He wiped the tears from his eyes as the cold bit at his skin. “I miss you old friend, and I don’t think I”ll ever feel like I’ve done enough to repay you. So much beauty lost, so many ideas and thoughts never found again. Someone once told me of our book, and it truly isn’t mine, it’s ours, they told me, “You love your main character too much, you didn’t give him the flaw that makes his death a tragedy.” I told him, “The tragedy of his death is he had no flaw, and my love couldn’t have been enough, or he would still be here.” He drew from his pocket a beautiful black marble pen. “The pen I taught you with, the one I wrote the story with…it’s out of ink, ran out on the final word,” he said, pausing, “God must be a writer.” He set the pen in the snow, sticking up like a small grave. “Your grave was too much for me, so I leave it where we first met, where our first lesson was conducted, and where we will see each other again someday.” He looked up at the sky. “Until then, I won’t forget you, I don’t think I could. Every night I remember you in my prayers, and wonder if there is hope. I always believed in you, and I hope that you can believe in me now and forgive me. I’m going to spend my life making it up to you. Until we see each other again friend.” He stood for a moment, then turned and walked off through the crisp snow, the black marble pen left standing alone in the endless fields.