I Believe in Sherlock Holmes

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I Believe in Sherlock Holmes

Many people have come and gone throughout the course of my life. Most before we had ever even met. Most just flashes of faces and vague memories of things I thought once mattered. Most I didn't particularly give one care or another to if they remained with me.

But that was all before I went to war; saw and did things that haunt my dreams and make me cry out in my sleep. Before I came back as someone different. Someone broken. Someone who needed you.

And when I returned, my therapist had me start a blog as a way to help me make since of my emotions and the dark bits of blood and the sounds of gunshots that swirl around in my brain that I somehow miss; a constant cacophony of death on never-ending reel for your amusement.

But then we did meet. Like a whirlwind on an acid-trip that was blew through everything about me in awkward patterns that only really made since to you, and even then, only when you stopped to visit your mind palace and really thought about it. And ever so slowly, though not slowly at all, it became about the cases that where once yours and now ours; our adventures in solving whatever mysteries happened to catch your eye in whatever town they had sprung from. Sometimes it felt like we where on some kind of deranged road-trip and you would just pick a town so you could uproot it's history and solve any mystery might be there before heading off to another with the single minded determination of the ever-so-curious.

But it was really just about you. And how you saved me from myself. It's really about how you taught me to be brave again; and how I loved you for it.

What if I still miss you in a year?

What if I still miss you in the one after?

I asked you for one more miracle, as I stood before a stone proclaiming that you where resting beneath it. And I didn't believe it for a second. I knew better than that. I asked you to stop this. To come back. To not be dead.

You didn't answer me then. I knew you wouldn't. I knew you couldn't. You did this for a reason; even if I didn't know why. And even with knowing, I mourned for you. I mourned my best friend; and the one person I cared about more than any other.

And then, one night that, in retrospect, was really merely an ordinary night in which I had turned to sipping scotch and flipping through the telly as I always did before turning into bed; You where there. Standing in the doorway of 221B Baker street as if you'd left not an hour past for milk, rather than having been gone for One Thousand Fifty Seven days and roughly Thirteen hours.

You just told me we had a case and that I should get the tea on because it was a three-patch problem. And after all this time, it's still you.

I admit I wasn't sure how to react. So a lot of things happened at once that I don't particularly remember, though there where remnants of the actions in the morning.

Like the scotch and bits of glass I had to clean from the carpet.

And the bloodied lip I had to sanitize for you while you rambled on about how I was wasting time, just like always.

Like how I woke up on the floor with you beside me; not touching in any way, but almost. Our eyes met in that moment as the faint light of morning poured through the windows, bringing with it an understanding that was not quite love, but could never be anything else, and lifted a weight from my heart, and your eyes. Because the first words I said to you gifted me in return with a smile from them I never thought I would see again.

I believe in Sherlock Holmes.

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