Parting

We stayed up through the night, that last night of starry skies, that last night when childhood ghosts ran across the yards, slipped down the outside basement stairs, kicked soccer balls and threw footballs, each one of them laughing. We heard them all and recognized each one, saw their grinning faces. We played light up bocci with them, down one pasture and up the next, watch out for the groundhog hole, as the bonfire threw its sparks, luminescent orange, blazing red, streaks of gold and blue-green  into the sky, crackling. The frogs and crickets sang for us and the hoot owl called and we cried. For our twenty-five years there. For the childhoods we were abandoning now. No turning back. No more sledding here. No more climbing trees or building forts. 

The pending real estate closing was gaining traction, steamrolling our past into oblivion. 

We cried and cried. Our heart-wrenching, stomach-clenching, throat tightened sobs pouring into the merciless night. No balm to be found for this kind of pain, this kind of irretrievable loss. We tell each other it will become part of who we are. But these are just words. Kind, empty words.