I remember sunburnt shoulders

When I heard that you died, I felt your leaving like a layer of absence, as though a sliver had been excised. The loss of you is subtly haunting, a faint resonance in a largely vacated space.

Decades ago, in our shared boyhood, we ran through the carefree hours between schooling and nascent adulthood. Before girls and cars and credit cards, and all the other debts of growing up.

Apart.

Time flew, migratory bird, and the world opened up between us. A space carved from circumstance and forgetting. The mundane distance of childhoods left behind.

I heard only snippets. The fiancée who left. The lengthy depression. But then, a few short months ago, they told me you were well. New love, new job, new hope. From my silent remove, I was happy for you.

A blink later, you were ill. Then gone. Three days ago…and I realised in that sudden jolt that I had not seen you, or made any move to contact you, for forty years. Maybe more. The wide, open expanse of erasure and memory. Brutal and ordinary. We turn around, and when we look back, nothing is there.

Except the lovely mirage. The disinterred vision of your sunburnt shoulders. You smiling, me peeling the skin. Now you live in sunshine. Always summer hols.

We were never men, only boys. Endless sun-browned optimism. Naïve peace. I tell myself you are back in the garden of play, knowing at last a form of rest to match that once unspoilt demeanour.   

You laugh, and skin shines pink on shirtless shoulders. Finally unburdened.