I lay down and closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath, no… on his breath -to tell the dream the way it was, whole and rambling and growing with every moment it is kept alive.
I think sometimes that I could speak forever like that – giving voice to the way it could be – waiting for the pictures to fly in from some parallel dimension – to memories of a me that hasn’t lived that past yet. My waking dreams collide with the moments of sleep where I cross over and steal time from another self, the one who can fly, the one who has short hair, the one with twins, the one who loves dogs and lives in Alaska. She’s so busy, that other girl (because I am still a girl in my mind – where the song was written for me and my real life is waiting to begin) and how can she be anything else. In this moment, though, there is accord. One speaks, one dreams, one remembers, and the power of that story is enough to focus and slow his breath & to gentle her beating leaping heart. In the conjuring of that moment the castle is real, the children are beautiful, the bird sits quiet in this stranger’s hands.
I open my eyes and he is there, frail, solid and perfect and so full of love I can feel the truth of it shining around his edges, warm and deep as sunlight on a black hat in winter. I breath there and then and remind myself that forever is only made up of more moments than we can safely count, that to deny this one would be to shake the foundation of time, that refusing the feeling of this kiss, this hope could alter all of space.

I like to feel that what I do matters, so I take his face in my hands, take his eyes with my own and believe into them for a whole count of ten. A whole ten-count of this kind is more than many people will stand. Newborns, young lovers, old lovers and the nearly dead (in that order) are good at staring at angels, but the rest of us have to work not to let our souls blink. I feel like I’m improving at this and since I am long-born and neither old nor young I wonder briefly what this skill says about tomorrow… and choose to believe in this moment – that it is something good.