There are things I don’t understand –
things I’ll never be able to comprehend.
You are a perfect example.
Your face is a thousand glass fragments,
each gleaming with a distorted reflection,
of a man I may have known in a past life,
a soldier lost on a battlefield,
a man at war with the demons of his mind,
a ghoul with withered sheet-white skin,
a man who, if I squint my eyes enough,
vaguely resembles the hero you were to me.

Communication has been lost throughout lifetimes;
I have hurdled the entirety of the universe
and the signal between you and me is full of static.
I often don’t understand what you’re trying to say –
you speak a foreign language,
one I can hear, clear as day, yet I cannot register.
It’s a language built upon noxious nightmares,
and the terror that loosens your mouth
to profanities, apologies, prayers, and pleading.
I hear you, but I can’t understand your garbled words –
your language of rage and desperation.

There are things I don’t understand,
and while answers will come with time,
you will forever be incomprehensible to me
held together by duct tape, souring glue, and
the sunlight that molds your cracked edges together,
into a frame of blinding, broken atrocities.

But I fear that one day your voice will clear
and the glass fragments will pull themselves together
to form a beautiful pane framed with gold,
and you will reach out one trembling hand,
across space and time,
across the Universe,
and you will strain to hear my voice,
the one constant throughout the years,
and all you will hear
is static.