The Gentlest Soul

I met the boy with the gentlest soul in the Indian Himalayas.

Quiet voiced and mild mannered, his very being whispered poetry. Frail, bent and still, he was a tall Keats displaced in time.  It did not take more than a half step into the world of fancy to see his angled features, shadowy in flickering candle light, bent over a sheet of yellowed parchment.  He was an ethereal time traveler spirited away to rural India, looking at the world with the calmest eyes.  In another time, I would have fallen in love with him.

               
     In the here and now, he enlivened me.  Normally stifled by shyness and awkwardness, I fluttered around his stillness, talking breathlessly, continuously, carelessly.  He watched with even gaze, clarifying my half-thought out sentences and clipped words with careful questions.  I buzzed with a reckless energy and vivacity I had never before possessed, and he watched, with quiet intensity.

Sitting on a rock by an Indian stream, I talked.   I fixed my eyes on the boy, more a man than a boy, and I let the words come, curling my legs under my body.  He waded through the water, nodding at my words, an otherworldly half-smile gracing his lips.  As the sun slid down below the mountain peaks, the world was on fire and I burned with a desire to speak until I ran out of words. 

He listened. 

Maybe I was a little in love with him. 

And I wish him a happily ever after.