Moonlight glows on my skin
The stars fill up the sky
Remember how we watched them
When you were still alive?
Stumble through the back roads
With anger in our eyes
The secret lives in my soul
I wish you were alive,
I can't wish you back to life
You found no point in staying
No future in this place
I heard what you were saying,
We burn out like a flame
It seems like such a shame
We fade out like a flame
Lying on my back atop my apartment building, I gaze up at this Los Feliz limelight we sometimes refer to as the moon. With its effervescent glimmer, it glides me and the whiskey I'm holding to that place of forlorn remembrance. I light a cigarette and out of the smoke ring I puff emerges a face that frequently haunts me at this witching hour.
I was sixteen years old the first time I fell in love. Like an ephemeral sunbeam she burst into my heart and set ablaze all of the darkness that had settled in. Damaged souls both, we used to go out into the country side after midnight and walk side by side along the hardened dirt pathways glowing in the moonlight. We would smoke forbidden cigarettes and talk about...everything...and nothing...and for that short time, the chaotic world around us would pause to let us dance effortlessly in the eye of it's storm. It was on these paths that I shared my first kiss with her. Not my first physical kiss, mind you, but my first real kiss. The kiss where your lips touch and you know that time sort of stops and allows that part of you that no one ever sees to come out and connect with another. We didn't talk after...we didn't need to. The cascading moonlight said everything.
I don't know how may nights we spent on those well worn dirt pathways of adolescence, but I do know how brightly those memories flare up and sear the very fabric of my melancholy nostalgia.
The way those beams bounced off of her hair and radiated out into the dark unknown that we were so readily terrified of. The way my arms felt wrapped around her when her frantic and fragile figure slowly melted into mine.
The way the stars sparkled promises of a tomorrow we would never know. The way how, when you're young, everything seems like forever, but feels like yesterday. The way that, out where the trees swayed gently in that pale moonlight, we didn't have to worry about what was awaiting us on the other side of paradise, but only how our hands fit together like the pieces of a cosmic puzzle.
The way she glanced up at me with her soulful eyes, searching endlessly for a connection that was never meant for this world after telling me her most intimate secrets...secrets that my soul will bear until it embarks on that ultimate journey that will re-unite us in the pale moon prairies of paradise.
I finish my rooftop cigarette and take a strong pull from the whiskey glass. I can't wish the memory of what I was doing the night they called and said the pills you were taking were just a few too many. I can't wish you next to me to heal the harsh blood moon bruises that cripple me. I can't wish for one more night on that moon soaked path where I could knot up the frayed fragments of our faith.
I can't wish you...back to life.