Ours Together

There is something I should share with you...










Sitting on the kitchen floor of our second floor apartment between the oven and the cabinets, I looked at her. Her golden hair flowed around her face like a halo, I asked, "What do you want to do with our life?"

She said, "I want to remember you just like this with the sun shining down on you, wearing those bleach stained jeans, sitting on the floor, looking at me, loving me, and asking me that question."

On the day that her ashes scattered I became the sole inheritor, guardian, and warden of this priceless memory. I buried it in a vault I carved from the bedrock deep, deep underground, in a steel chest, behind iron gates where no one could ever find it because it was mine. It belonged to me. Me alone.

For thirty years I have kept safe, kept secret, and jealously guarded this gilded moment, this priceless fragment of frozen time that she wanted to be hers forever because it was hers. It belonged to her. Her's alone.

Today, I unlocked the gates, climbed down the dusty stone steps deep, deep underground, I passed down the corridor to the vault where the steel chest lay that I hid there decades before. I took the chest and carried it to the surface where I opened it in the sunlight where it all began.

Now, you have this memory because it is yours. It belongs to you. You alone.

We only keep the things we give away.

Keep it in the light.