i think that the curve of your shoulderblade saved me. i know that it's too much to expect this love of ours to be transcendent somehow, but it is; every day that passes with you makes of me someone completely new than the person i was before, somehow stronger, somehow wiser, somehow more resolved.

i write you a million love letters that i will never send, though you would probably find redemptive peace in having them. i have lost myself for days in the feel of my lips upon your freckled shoulder, my hands across your back, your cool skin against mine, stifling a fever unbeknownst to us both. something within me aches and you are the only remedy.

i think a lot of things, but it's nothing that i'd mention

Twelve hours wrapped in your arms, and I now feel as though something is missing, now that you're away. What is this state I'm in, such that I feel almost foreign in my skin without you to keep me in it?

My head is adrift in words you spoke half asleep, half-drunk (on the alcohol or your time with me, I'm not really sure, but I suspect it was both), when you murmured how happy you were to have me with you. You confessed your secret plans to keep me forever and gave yourself away, but I don't mind, and I don't mention it. Here are the words that I am terrified to say-- after you'd fallen asleep, your arms wrapped tightly around me, I memorized the rise and fall of your chest and promised my life to you.

This is the end of so much, and yet it feels so very much like a beginning.

maybe they waked and called it a dream.

i watch you holding onto every tenuous strand of us with both hands, like a baby, or someone drowning. this is why we are forever together, never completely apart. it is as though tumbling from the womb i grasped for some safe space, some tremulous hold onto the familiar, and reaching back through space and time and into another life, i found you and grabbed on, and our hands clenched tightly, we slept.

all of life outside the now has been the dream of two children forever holding hands, through darkness and into oblivion-- why would we dream such things? i don't know and can only imagine, but i lied before when i said that it was silent prayers issued to stars that gave me faith and courage to go on, for it was the knowledge of the dream. i slept through shouting matches and houses that shook, through bits of plaster raining down like tears from an uninformed god, slept clutching your hand every step of the way, eyes closing, returning to your side, where there was green and warmth and the feel of your skin pressed against my back and the hushed sound of your breaths, as i would count them one by one the way mortal men count sheep.

you spoke in your sleep even then, silken and filled with promises. you are the only one i have ever known with the power or conviction to swear oaths to another while half-asleep, and i rejoice inside on a daily basis to know that it is for me that you have done this. shall we pack up our lives and run away, then, finding some place that can grant us the calm and the safety that we grant one another? i fear that this world, for all its beauty, will always fall desperately short of that which we create for each other, so instead of worldly offers, i give to you myself instead, which to you will seem like everything, and this is but another reason why i love you.

i have always had your name imprinted somewhere deep beneath my flesh, boiling there like a cry desperately waiting to escape. in that living dream of us together, perhaps you left it there while tracing runes across my back with fingers drenched in magic, making me forever yours, or perhaps while i slept securely wrapped up in you, something birthed from deep within you lodged itself in me, a taste of the future that we would have together. i long ago accepted that you have within you the strength to dismantle the universe.