The Deep Cold

 I saw him shivering from a deep cold as I asked him some casual questions to step my words closer to something of substance. He gave me an honest answer to the questions that I didn't even make my way to asking. He looked at me and said "You know what's going on... YOU, know exactly what I am going through" With disarmed pretense I calculated the costs of honesty, but I held back. "do you want to talk about it?" I asked, knowing that he knows that I would understand. That if there was something that knew how deep that cold was, I did. I held my tongue from wagging some unsolicited advice.

I remember sitting where was. That feeling of proverbial shrapnel embedded in your lungs and heart so that every pulse and every breath bears remembrances. You feel like you survived something that you weren't meant to, and a part of you is still out there in the debris. I remember sitting where he was, in the cold, and a man approached me and beckoned me to chat with him. My wounds were many, and bled upon his feet as I spoke of a ghost that never died that still haunts my dreams. His words were that of a friends when he spoke to me saying "It will continue to hurt for a very long time" With the honesty I'd have cried if it weren't for the fact that my tears had all been spent. I looked at him because he knew. He didn't try to address my pain with superficial words or sugarcoated falsehoods. He told me the very direct and necessary truth.

There are still pieces of that bullet in my chest and I can still feel them when I move sometimes. The heart scars, and we survive and we soldier on, moving forward facing whatever new thing the next day brings. I'd tell him that it will always hurt, but the pain will dull in time. As real as the cold bites to the bone, the harshness of winter will always pass