Respecting the Memory of "Us"

When I was younger, the nights were worse than the days.  When I tried to quiet my roiling brain, thoughts of the missing man I loved would poke their snouts into the swirling river of thought commanding my brain.  Every bit of hard-fought calm met an equal measure of pain.

Long into the night,  I would lie on my side in my bed, knees pulled to my chest, arms wrapped around my knees,  unable to breathe except in gasps, tears sliding down my face occasionally, sometimes so late into the night that I would have to call into work sick the next day.

Now it's the mornings that kill me.  Not even coherent yet, the presence of his absence rings in my mind afresh.  Another small death, another tolling of the bells. The throbbing of the bells, the sobbing of the bells in unhappy Runic rhyme.  The rolling of the bells, the tolling of the bells keeping shrieking time for my broken heart.

I can't help but know throughought my being that I need not ask for whom these bells toll . . . They toll in respect for our memory.

~Riot.Jane

(apologies to John Donne and Edgar Allen Poe)