The warmth you left in this bed has long since gone.  I brought it here, the bedroom set, sent for it after you died.  It bears my adult weight now every night and I wonder how you and dad slept together in such a narrow space because I consume it all.

The scent that was you of clean soaped skin, vaseline and bergamot is faded now by decades of wandering memories.  Your scent was nurture and strength and everything that was supposed to be.  I barely remember.  Nestled in the certainty of the safety that was our home I curled up here against the glow of your polished cherry wood headboard with no concept of my having been conceived beneath sheets laid upon the mattress here  while I listened to the sounds of you.  No concept either of the dangers you and dad had overcome to create for me and sis this haven, this place where the world was ours to take.

The sounds and smells of my childhood were innocent and fleeting, like the seeds of a dandelion on my breath, fragile but determined to be rooted somewhere.  The storms of madness dashed us to bits and I, once untied from the moorings of home with oceans of time between you and me, harbored washed up driftwood thoughts, gnarled and sanded smooth by adversity.  What were you?  Who might you have been had you not suffered the escape of reason.

There is another warmth though, that seems to have endured beyond the throes of calamity and the depths of unhappy times.  It seeps into my bones early in the morning when the rain falls gently through the oak trees outside my bedroom window.  I submerge myself now in these years when I am past the urgency of what must be done.  This glow of what must be hope comes seeping through like water from a hidden spring.  It warms the innermost part of me and wants to be set free.  My lofty memories’ now defunct reference point circumscribes safety and the integrity of trust.  Still, endeared to me is a tiny snippet of thought life from long, long ago.  No matter to anyone but me and that is likely as it should be.