The Blood & The Bones

Do you know what it was like to love you?
To watch you leave knowing less of you would come back?
The first time I was so proud and so naive. I would have refused to let you go if I had known how much they would ask.
And how I’d have to look on as they chipped away at who you were for stars and colors. For bravado and bullshit agendas because you could never win the battle you went there to fight for. What difference could we make when peace has never been the goal?
I watched for years as you went gray and faded right in front of me. It wasn’t age. It was annihilation. Death by a thousand cuts.
I still reached for you, unfailingly even though I did not understand and you always turned away from me and toward duty.
But where was your duty to me? To us?

He knew right away that she had not understood but how could she? It took him years to understand it himself.
You did not know what it meant to me to go, I didn’t know how to tell you, I don’t know that I have those words, but I promise I never left you.
I carried you into every battle. In my heart. On my back. Do you know the weight of that?
I was there to fight, yes. Some men are built like that. But mostly I wanted to be something someone could be proud of. I longed to be a man people looked up to. I needed some kind of purpose because I was lost everywhere else I had ever gone.
And it took too long to realize that this feeling that burdened me, that pulsed and ached when I was gone, was because all that I truly loved and that loved me in return was far away from me back home.
I think it took leaving to know. To understand why I never thought about making it back home for me.
Only for you. Only for this. Only for us. What I did there is not for nothing.
But this is where my purpose lives and I’m sorry the realization took so long.

the blood
& the bones