Amy again.
It seems I cannot look at a single beautiful thing without thinking about you. Especially the kind of soft, indigo beauty behind the haze at the end of a warm spring day. When the vine outside the window rustles with the noises of opening buds and baby leaves and feathers. Nest building. And sudden birdsong like an exclamation point to the silence, the peace.
So many, many years ago, I felt exactly this kind of peace. When we read together, but apart, in your bed in the afternoons. When you laid a hand on my cheek and kept it there, cool and camay-scented, that afternoon that I had a fever and slept with my head against your shoulder. Like that afternoon when I was reading one of my nature books, and you were reading a large green leather bound one that I couldn't read the name of. And suddenly in the middle of the silence, you read out a sentence to me in Russian. And I couldn't understand it of course, but I understood it was something beautiful you'd wanted to share so I smiled up at you and you at me. And we spoke that afternoon about the Steppe, about long yellow stretches of grassland curving up and away into an immense vault of sky. About herds of wild horses thundering across a sharply empty landscape tipped at the edges with a ring of bare mountains. And I scarcely noticed where I was as you talked, until the smell of Janardhan watering the lawn wafted in through the window. That exclamation point, this time of the scent of water to punctuate the dry yellow stillness of the windswept Steppe.
The air around us heavy with beauty. We imagined it together, we smelt it together, we breathed it together.
Or that night when you were lying in bed and mum was on the phone in the other room, crying, and my father was driving over from the hospital and everything was very dark and quiet except for the crickets in the garden and the moths near the bedside lamp. And you suddenly squeezed my hand and opened your eyes and said 'Darling baby. You're here!' and put your hand against my cheek and wiped away a tear. And that sound right then was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and I smiled our smile at you but couldn't stop crying.

I miss you so much.