An Ending

Standing face to face.
Young love.
Words uttered barely above a whisper.

In sickness and in health.

In health.
It’s carefree and easy.
It’s late nights and later mornings.
It’s mountaintops without a valley.
It lasts and lasts until it doesn’t.

In sickness.
It’s blinding and confusing.
It’s nights that turn to day with no spacers.
It’s both avoidable and unavoidable in the same short breath.
It lasts and lasts until it doesn’t.

Collectively, we wish health.
In body.
In mind.
In silence.

We cling to it.
We put it on each day.
And wash it to reuse the next.

We look down at hands and feet
That move in memorized motion.
And we think and apply and love and listen
Out of sharp mind and muscle memory.

And then one day something sharp appears
Something draining
Something frightening
Something off.
And the promise is given life.

In sickness and in health.

Appointments become getaways.
Letters arrive demanding funds
For tests that had no right answer
Only guesses and questions and…sadness.

But that wasn’t the promise
In sickness and sadness.
In sadness of sickness.

Those whispered words spoken with nativity
Prove true

Mountaintops of health
Valleys of sickness
Coloring in the boxes
Of young lives paint by number dreams

The dark shades balancing the sky blues.
To complete the honest picture called life.