Losing a Child

Every season ends. Each page must turn and/to reveal the rest of the story.
I’ve never been good at goodbye – especially when I know it’s coming.
I wake in cold sweats… the cry of the child echoing in my conscious dreaming.
Faces flashing through my mind like sepia photographs.
Her eyes haunt me.
This is the time for goodbye.
And I again must wrestle with issues of trust. I walk alone through these pages, as I always do. My arms are empty – the blue eyed one that ceased to be.
Can I leave this child behind? Eternity rides in the balance and I must place her in your hands to save. Will you react? Will you hold my heart-cry in your arms; or will you turn a blind eye to her soul due to the hardness of others like her?
The world turns full circle. The tears, the hope, the rage, the silence, the dawn.
Thirty thousand feet below, Kabul sleeps. And so does she.

As always, the time eludes me – on journeys like this, one day runs into the next. I feel I have shut down my heart. Given way to the awfulness of the change about to occur. Nothing is the same – and we are all too tired to connect. I do the things that are necessary to survive.

Silence permeates the concrete walls around my heart. Echoes of voices long gone … a place of great faith with no hope. Perhaps that is the reason I am so drawn to these dirt streets. I understand the covering and the pain. Life goes on as normal despite the state of emergency. All belief lays low … waiting for a time when it is appropriate again to speak my mind.

The heat beats down on broken skin. It filters to every corner of the city. There is no release. When will peace come? How much death must pass before my eyes … until the time of your coming? Will you restore my child’s soul? Will you bring laughter back to these hollow rooms?
Empty hands.
How long?

And thus we wait. The house is silent. There is no sound of muffled feet or tiny song. No echo of dishes or water splashing over an outdoor drain. There is no one left. No one to tell. Just an empty house…
And the ghost that haunts it.