ran my fingers over the small of your back and missed the mountains. thought about what it felt like in your room, before i told you, how excited you were to see me. the lighthearted joking and the moment of respite when i thought you’d done something equally as stupid, the look on your face when i realized you hadn’t. the gnawing feeling watching you walk up and down the biggest sand dunes i’d ever seen, that i hadn’t imagined existed here, and knowing i’d broken something before i could experience it and in that moment knowing i was at your mercy. i came to your shoulder and felt lucid and remembered falling asleep with you on the phone and seeing you at the airport for the first time, heart in my throat and knowing you were someone i’d never met before and touching your face and knowing. moved my fingers across your upper back to its counterpart and thought of everything i’d done since that was antithetical to that, I remembered your mother telling me to treat you right because you loved like no one else in the world and taking it for granted. i remembered telling you i didn’t think we were right together because i wanted to keep getting high, realizing what i’d said and blaming my mother for inadvertently giving me the idea. telling you i was wrong and that this was the last time and it not being the last time and your continued patience and my apathy. i wrapped my hand around your side and thanked God for the person i’d become with your help and the man i was excited to be as we raised children together. i pulled closer to you and watched you sleep and when you woke up i could’ve seen it then if i’d looked buy my hubris convinced me it was something tertiary, unimportant, something that would pass. i took my hand from your side, lowered it to your hip and moved slowly toward your thigh. i thought about your bedroom again and how it felt. i wondered what i could do to get back to that place. i listened to you breathe, your light snores, and again if i’d listened then i would’ve known. the life i pictured wasn’t real, you couldn’t ever play that part with me. i’d taken too much and every time i did you closed off another piece of your indomitable love to protect yourself from the same person that told you they’d never treat you like anything less than royalty. until any love you felt for me came exclusively from a place of fear that i wasn’t who you thought i was, that i’d hurt you again when it mattered most. nevertheless, i listened and i loved you and wondered what i did to deserve the beautiful woman sleeping so absurdly next to me. i remember finally moving my hand from your body and staring up at the ceiling and the feeling of falling as i drifted off to sleep, then waking up and for a split second knowing you were gone. moving my fingers over the small of your back again to remind me that it’s happened, we’re here, together, and but still shooting upright while im falling back to sleep again. the fan makes it quieter and we wake up and i dont know it then but i can tell i can feel how badly you want to trust me, i know how much you want to love me. i don’t know that i know it then but i know why you can’t. you still try and i’m still trying but i get so distracted and you get so bored and you spend so long analyzing and i can’t blame you. it’s morning and we’re eating and when we’re out of bed for me it depends and for you it depends but today we’re happy and most of the time we’re happy but you know it and i probably know it too but i’m a person and you’re a person and it’s comfortable and the alternative is terrifying but isn’t it all terrifying? isn’t being alive something inherently frightening, something beautiful and bizarre, boundless, limited only by capital and imagination, though with enough of the latter, the former can be negated, something that offers us so much but still, underneath it all, something that demands our respect? something we all fundamentally understand, the fear that makes the beauty the opportunities the magic of the world so bright and so vivid. so auspicious and available. something that logistically, even then, i understood. comfort breeds nothing, no innovation. for you this isn’t acceptable. for me, i’m still working on remembering what i haven’t lost yet. the days are safe and calm but the world is out there beckoning, calling us both. you answer first and i fight for a moment before i see the look on your face and understand this feeling in the pit of my stomach of a knot being pulled isn’t to stop me but to prepare me. i’m in bed again and for the last time im running my fingers over the small of your back.