If only there was something to do about all the missing.  Because this now is truly something remarkable.  And trust me when I tell you that I find joy here, too.

But to turn my mind's eye back and to see us as younger versions of ourselves before we discovered the outside world...that is truly something to behold.  Imagine us then, before the Frodo and Bilbo had been proven impossible, before the choosing of what we do for a living (which inevitably and heartbreakingly becomes us), and before we moved (or were carried, perhaps) so far from one another.

There is a house, too, that I think of often.  With old, creaking floors and a wildwood directly behind. There are baths of oatmeal for the poison ivy and cardboard swords and a world I would not have the courage or audacity to create any longer.

And we are there.  All together.  Playing night games with skinned knees in the late summer twilight. Or cuddled together with the old piano hammering Christmas tunes to our off key renditions of hymns. And we are there, certainly, on the nights of feet of snow, snuggled as close as possible to the wood-burning cast iron stove.

And even though so much of that youth was filled with unknowing - the unfamiliarity of this body and this heart, of where I was headed, of who I would become - there was so much beauty in the wandering.  So much beauty in the long, drawn out, and often boring summer days.  Because at least, then, being together was not simply reserved for holidays and weddings and the off chance of running into one another on some distant, distant weekend.

There is missing interminably behind me.  In every moment that has passed and every person whose heart no longer beats close to mine.  There is beauty in time's passage and there is normalcy there, but to be together again, locked in singular moments of grace and loveliness would be quite a gift.  To see you go off, then, my old friend and find your own place in this world gives me such great joy.

Joy beyond joy.  But sadness, too.  Because you are there without me.  And, inevitably, we will grow old apart.  Apart.  Such a wicked, awful word.  Because there is no you in it.  None at all.