Do you remember these songs? The ones we danced to for the first and last time?

I still listen to those songs sometimes. Like I did tonight.

It’s been almost a year since you’ve been gone. Except it’s more like a year since I’ve been gone.

Do you remember that night when we were trying to sleep, but we couldn’t because we were wrapped in conversation? You told me to listen to this song, this song that you said made you calm no matter what. I put in my earbuds and listened to the soft plunk of the piano at the beginning.

There is a house built out of stone…

My house isn’t build out of stone. But yours is. Maybe you were my stone. Maybe you were strong and I wasn’t. This is a place where I don’t feel alone. This is a place where I feel at home. If you’re my stone, does that make you my home?

It doesn’t matter now. I’m homeless.

I wonder if you felt the same about me. Was I your home, until it disappeared? From me? From you?

It’s just dust now. Remnants of emotions, of thoughts, of words said, of things done. The wind blows and I’m high in a tree, the dust swirling around me, clouding my face, getting into my lungs and my eyes and my heart. The tree blows where the home once stood.

Do you remember as the song climbed high up that tree, high up with a cacophony of sound emanating from violins and violas and a deep bass and a grand piano? And how we danced, how we stared at each other, brown and blue? And I held on as tightly as you held onto me? The tree shakes in the wind and I held on as tightly as you held onto me.

But the wind stops as suddenly as it started. The tree stands still.

And now, it’s time to leave and turn to dust…