There’s a cement block a few steps near to where you breathed your last breaths. I sit here at dusk and at dawn, seeking the hours when the naive passersby might not intrude on my thoughts. They have no idea that a saint in the form of a teenage young man went home on this hallowed ground. I have no idea why I was chosen to hold your hand before I held your name in my head. Had I known what was happening, I would have sung you a lullaby of a Lord who sees the sparrow and lovingly numbers his days. How can it be that the injustice of the world is that the good are meek and milk and the wicked comes to destroy.
Why was I chosen to help usher you home, but for a despair that I could not have spoken to my father and sister while yet conscious before they breathed their last. For years, I carried the agony of having longed to look them in their eyes and be a comfort to them, a love in a transition we all anticipate. And in you, my brother in Christ, I was afforded a tragic beauty in seeing you into the other side of eternity. Oh but the haunting of you, that such goodness would be senselessly taken while evil roams about makes me ill to walk this earth.
They have paved the gravel path that led me to you, but the briar patch that held your body remains. In the spring days I watch the chickadees flit from branch to branch, collecting the organic debris that held your head and it is only I who watch and know what took place here nearly four years ago. The little birds know not where they toil. Sometimes a concerned walker seems to wonder at my state, sitting on this block, deep in thought, tears falling down my face. I want to tell them, here is holy ground. Here is where the angels came down and rejoiced at your coming home while the world stood in sorrow and angst.
But I keep my words to myself and look down, eyes close and my heart aches for the answers of such tragedy. I wish that I could have known you, but only the stories of your family and friends will fill the void of a boy I so briefly knew, a hand I touched, a spirit I felt reach for the heavens. The scent of you stayed with me for three days. Call me crazy, somehow I knew it was you, a presence, an aura of a soul going home.
The air seems different here, cleaner, calmer. The briars bent in such a way, that it appears they still hold your fallen frame. A blanket of thorns for a saint whose heart failed him at such a young age, and fate once more has my scorn.
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