Today you have been with me. I have seen your face, heard your voice, felt your touch. Yes, though you are far, in body and in spirit, today you have been with me.
When I woke this morning, I didn’t really wake. I lay in bed in that precarious state of half-sleep, and my mind drifted. My mind drifted, and it found you. You, lying next to me. You, with your arm around my waist. You, breathing on my neck. When I woke this morning, I was not alone. You were there with me.
I moaned, knowing it couldn’t be true. A cruel trick, torture, that’s what really was. You were asleep in your own bed, warm underneath your own blankets. Meanwhile I shivered from the cold of your absence. You would not have been there, with me; I would not have had that luck, that joy, that gift. I knew, I forced myself to know, and I turned to break the reverie, but suddenly! — Your fingers traced my spine, dancing all the way from the small of my back to the nape of my neck. I moaned in amazement, because you were there with me.
I thought you would disappear as the day went on, fade away like a shade, like a phantom from another world, like the ephemeral spirit that you are. And you did, for a while, and I thought I was safe. But now here it is, noon on a snowy Thursday, and I’m sitting by the window, waiting for things to start, and suddenly here you are, shadowing me, silent and invisible and here. I can still feel your fingers on my back, hovering over my skin, waiting for things to start. It’s as if they never left–as if you never left–as if we were still in my bed wrapped in the warmth of each other.
But that is not the case, that is not reality. So I write ‘ai’ on the palm of my hand, and ball it into a fist, to keep you close, to carry you with me.
