I curse your name even as your image fills my head and evaporates what is left of my will. I need you, the greatest source of my strength and my greatest weakness. I need the calming balance of your hand on my forehead, the feel of your skin under my palm, and yes, the tears you cry when I remind you that my love, however whole or fragmented, comes with a physical price. I am not whole without holding some piece of you - your love, your blood, or the wounds you inflict, that I carry with me. You remind me that I am human, but never allow me to dwell upon my flaws.

My reflection in the mirror is secondary to the shadows over my shoulder, in my unfocused eyes, which play cruel tricks on my mind in the haunted silence. I hear myself breathe and feel the wave of sensation that runs across my skin when you appear behind me. Your presence is unmarred by sound, but the warmth of your touch burns my skin. I curse you again for a variety of reasons, but mostly for my own inability to drive you away.

Would you leave? Would I allow you? The answers are said in the echoes as time stretches away from that first fateful meeting — Held in a dance with steps that play upon the nerve endings of my fingertips, the irises of your eyes. The base human need to understand and be understood, to be accepted, to be cherished, wanted. Sadism would have me deny you, deny me…everything else rejects such black and white, such sharp edges - instead thought plummets into an ocean of obscure desires.

It reduces down to this, I want you beyond the yawing close of time. These words feel like velvet on my tongue, clinging to each drop of sounded air as they leave - whispered out into the welcoming warmth of your skin, acknowledged in the morse code that dots the golden plane. The blade of my finger brushes over your cheek and roses erupt in its wake. Answering beauty responds to my call.

All paths lead us other ways. We make our own. You are my compass, I am yours. This phenomenon of nature is our truth, our random truth, for while everything else says no…

we say yes.