Until the End

    by Chrystal Berche

Sometimes it’s the first few notes of a piano

played with nimble fingers, ivory keys

that shatter the calm of a lonely drive

on a winter’s day, the sky

dark while I rage and pound the steering wheel

remembering the moment I heard the words

telling me you were gone.

Sometimes it’s the first few cords

wrung with heartrending beauty

from a black and silver guitar

like the one that you used to play

while I lay beside you

lost in a world only we could know,

clinging to one another, wishing

the whole world would fade away.

And sometimes it’s a whisper on a dark, long night

when I watch the shadows play along the wall

and listen to the wind

carry your voice from a lifetime away.

Who could have known there’d be no goodbyes

when we promised each other forever?

Tear-stained anniversaries and a million regrets,

a hundred questions, a thousand what ifs,

and a single image of a mocking grave.

They could bury your body,

but I’ve seen your soul

in an endless string of highway signs

screaming to me from ocean waves

like you’re still out there

surfing, and laughing, and showing off.

How can you be gone

when I still see you

in the shadows of every room you used to walk?

How can I forget that I was yours

long before I was anything else that mattered?

If a whisper in the night could bring you back

then I’ll listen for every whisper

until the end.

© 2014  Chrystal Berche

+ previously published in Aaduna magazine Summer 2014

Chrystal Berche writes. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggled, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other things she knows and loves. Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes its aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing she’s taking pictures, or curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.