Holding her pale body, caressing her, but a lost cause this was, long before she was mine.  It wasn’t what I had just witnessed, but the thoughts ravaging my suffering state, a state so excruciating that I felt nothing, while at the same time, sensing the impaling pain of everything that surrounded me.  Alone, just myself and this lady of whom I had just met, each of us staring into the others eyes, mine fixated like being woken from the deepest dream, while hers, totally lifeless, empty, looking straight through me, almost as if they were stealing my souls darkest secrets, unhinged secrets, secrets that had taken me a lifetime to collect, and now she knows me, yes -my secrets are not just mine any longer.

And to recall, just twenty minutes into my past, I was wading waist deep, through the frigid, murky waters of this river, lifting her pale body upon the bank, of which we now promptly rest.  Happening? -It was absolutely, swallowing me up in emotion, a situation now so baffling, that maybe none of this, here in this time, was meant to be, but it was, it was, otherwise any place else I’d rather be.  Who could be so evil, so malicious, that their wrath would overcome them, abdicating all that was right in this world, transforming a place so beauteous, into the pure grotesque, in just mere ticks of my timepiece.

This winding river, once known for its innocence, a floating tomb it has now turned, an inappropriate resting place for this once lovely maiden, still in my shaky arms, still staring a hole through my soul.  Nothing, -oh nothing that I can do, will halt my secrets from being transferred to her, conveyed from my wicked heart, into those blue eyes, bluer than the bluest sky, that watches over us, just above my sagging shoulders.

As each secret, each serving a maximum sentence, slowly exits my beaten body, I recognize that the beautiful maiden, of whom I was never there to protect, is now caring for me, not with those mysterious, big, blue eyes, but with a spirit, that hasn’t yet passed.  The nightmares that once haunted me, are now extinct, a burden now, for this butterfly in my arms to carry.  To ask for something like this, I would never do, but the enchanting maiden, that I found in the river, silently whispers to me, “I was sent here to release you from your torments tragedy, now a new world, a world awaits, and it all lies out there for thee”.