Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge. Lord Byron
I used to say there was no predicting
what would appear on the scans of Jimmy’s insides
from what we saw on the outside.
But when he began seeing double,
I didn’t need a picture
to know what the cancer was doing inside his head.
When he entered the bardo,
we, too, drifted between life and death,
traveling with him to the edge of the end.
He left us here,
splintered between the kingdom of the living
and the desolation of the dead.
It wasn’t until he had gone
that I noticed
how much I did not see.
The way our worlds divide
in so very many ways:
past and present, awake and asleep, still here and forever gone.
I live now in the land where the other shoe has dropped,
no way back to planet normal
or the luxury of worrying over what will never comes to pass.
The outside world and my inside life remain divided
by the boy whose death snatched the bridge away from me.
Suspended like a dragonfly in amber,
I have a window to the past,
a way to hold on until the final letting go.
