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.