How do we come to be here next to each other
in the night
Every time I arrive home, and every night when I finish getting ready for bed, an electric current runs across my skin and for just a second, I wonder if you will appear if I only love you enough. I don’t know how to love you any more than I do, and it breaks my heart every time when that split-second passes and you are not there.
I like to imagine that sometimes you are there next to me, even if I can’t see or feel you. We are two lovers, two soul-mates, separated by that which we will all eventually face, and which no one living can completely know. I feel like my soul is still tied to yours, but I don’t know what that means or where the end tethered to you can be found.
Sometimes I sit or lay down, close my eyes, and just feel the air around me, and the softness under me. You touched this couch, the sheets of this bed, breathed in the air in this house. There are still pieces of you here – seen and unseen. (Surely some of your exhaled carbon dioxide is still lingering?) Your touches, your love, your life – they are everywhere. Although I miss you and feel your absence every hour of every day, every once in awhile I can find a moment of peace in this possibility of you.