You constantly reminded me to wash my hands.

It was between those moments of gratuitous laughter,

Smiles hidden beneath overgrown daffodils.

I had touched the clouds that summer,

up on a mountain.

It wasn’t cotton-candy like,

more like floating water.

Up on that mountain,

we were heedlessly infinite.

Infinitely adrift in the pleasure of a single moment in time.

It had been just the three of us,

the height of our problems stemming from

the ‘Oohs and Ahhs’ of sore bee stings.

But your kisses made them better.

Blue floral wallpaper and sunflower seeds,

It seemed that no tears could survive in the mountain cottage.

A home lost to time,

We spent our days in that momentary forever.

It is now blurred to the alteration of memory.

Scarred to the impending danger caused by our everyday lives.

Much later I had caught typhoid fever.

Perhaps I should have washed my hands more often,

As you had said.

And as for the cottage?

Reality had entrapped it.

It had become a semblance of four concrete walls.

A paradise in a war zone.

A mystery lost to time

that will never be forgotten.