Heirloom

Somewhere down St. Andrews, as I remember, there was a little shop of fancy trinkets. My wife, as beautiful as she was, had always been deeply entranced by beautiful things, and so she peered into that little shop's window almost every day we passed it. She would peer for many minutes, it seemed, longing for the golden hairbrush which shined gently in the lighter weather. She would trace it's embellished pattern with her finger on the window, and caress her hair as she daydreamed. No, I would tell her. Far too expensive.

But on the eve of the following Christmas, I noticed that the little shop she loved was closing it's doors for good, and I remember feeling a deep tug at the bottom of my heart. My wife, beautiful as she, would never be able to peer through its window again, and I in turn would never again be able to watch her caress her hair or trace her fingers against the window pane. Perhaps I was a fool to spend so much so impulsively, but such was the way of our golden age.

I cannot fully describe the expression of my wife when I gifted her the golden hairbrush, ribbon-tied inside that little box, but it still remains the purest highlight of my memories with her. Even when the bombs began to fall, she would spend each morning caressing her hair not with her hands, but with the soft bristles of that brush; all whilst tracing it's patterns with her fingertips.

I was discharged from service only a couple of years into the fighting, but it seemed it had not been early enough. I could not return to my wife, for she was no longer there. I was instead returned in person to a heap of rubble and debris. Our house - our home, had been reduced to dust. At the time, I could not bear it, and I still long to see her gentle morning expressions once more. But as time passed and my eyes stung dry, sun-rays peaked through the dust and reflected off of something mostly buried amongst the stone. It took me a while to shift the brickwork, but I thought little of the blisters in my hand as I held my wife's hairbrush once more in my palm. It glimmered as she once did, beautiful as ever, unscathed by the chaos, and for a while I thought of nothing else as I traced my sore thumb over it's embossed back.

"No, I would not believe
The light could ever go
But the golden age is over."