The Frame I Held for You

I found the cassette in the coat pocket of a stranger's forgotten winter, back when I still believed love was something that happened to other people in old films. The tape hissed like rain on a tin roof; his voice, low and unhurried, said only: "Hold the frame steady, my darling. I am almost home."

So here I stand now, in this white room that smells of nothing but possibility, holding my hands up like a windowpane. The pink cotton against my chest still carries the warmth of his palm from that afternoon on the subway platform, where he traced the letters R-n-o-r across my shirt and called it our secret alphabet for "remember."

My fingers make a frame around your face in my mind. I do not need you to be real; I only need you to be near. The city outside is loud with its modern urgencies, but inside this little rectangle of light I have built, time slows the way it does on an old reel-to-reel, and I can hear the softest exhale of your breath across the years.

Heal me gently, you who were never fully gone. Hold the frame steady with me. I am almost home too.

Editor: The Courier of Time