You are only a stone now, cold in the winter and burning in the summer heat. But this is the closest I can come to being next to you. So I will sit here, next to your stone, with what used to be you under me, quietly feeding the grass.

They say that time is the great healer, but it has been years. The space I made for you is still there, empty since you left. Irrationality has made me wait, although I'm not sure what it is I'm waiting for. A great miracle? Death?

A great miracle is out of reach. Death is there, just beyond my grasp. Death is with you, separating us along this mortal coil.

The space where you used to be is so empty where it used to be so full. I trace the lines of the space and try to rejoice in the sunlight. And still, it is not second nature to me to know that you're not there. I still expect you when I come home. I still reach for you in my sleep. I still turn around, annoyed, that you don't come running to help open the lid of a testy jar. I still wait for you to come home.

I still expect you to be breathing beside me, offering up your loud, irritating commentary on this life you left me behind in. It is the same commentary that drew me in the first place, that made me argue back, that challenged both of us to challenge ourselves.

Am I pathetic? To be talking to empty air? Have I run off the cliff of sanity and fallen into the gulf of the Mad? To still make a list of all the things we should do one day, of all the things I need to tell you about my day...to still plan as if there is a lifetime ahead of us both?

Am I insane to construct retroactive fantasies of how it could have gone if only you hadn't gone? To imagine the morning after the night you stopped breathing, with your arms wrapped around me as always - as if the morning had come and we named our children like we'd planned? Who they would be if they had met you, known you, laughed with you. If the excitement we'd felt hadn't left me and turned into dread.

So many ifs. Because I still expect you. Time is nothing. Time is a circular wind, funneling down and destroying, doubling back on itself and putting us back into pivotal moments - after the fact.

What was the hour you left? What was the minute? Did you notice? Did you fight it? Or did you go gently?

I would rage, rage against it. And still, I expect you: even in the dying of the light. Even in the shades of grey, even in the bright sun. Always. I still expect you.

An Exercise on Perspective

It is an autumn day, with leaves turning every color and hanging onto their branches for dear, sweet life. Sweet, short life. And then: swirl and fly and fall. Rest.

Here is a girl sitting in a chair at a table on a patio next to a wall of brick. She doesn't have to dream of beauty because it is all around her in the chilly autumn air, full of the dance of the dying. The cool air turns to winter.

She doesn't have to dream because the better dream is here, sitting next to her in an identical chair, watching the same scene, breathing the same air. And yet:

"I'm here for this," she says, waving her arm around. She means that she is here for the beauty.

She is young, so she expects beauty to be equated with love and miracles.

She is young and so the notion of "seeing with my own two eyes" means "seeing with our two sets of eyes" and gleaning the same lesson from the world.

But youth is soon introduced to the concept of dimension and varying perspective: the fact that a miracle can never mean a fairy tale. The fact that a miracle is simple, no fanfare, just the compromise of two people agreeing to sit in one place, accepting that their own four eyes will look at the same scene and understand two entirely separate universes occupying the same space and time.

"I'm here for this," she says, indicating dying leaves. Beauty.

"I'm here for this," he counters, indicating beauty, as he pats the brick of the building fondly. Beauty: defined as institution. Defined without noticing one tree, or one leaf swirling on the wind, all danced out.

Two people agreeing to sit in one place and taking in two entirely separate universes occupying the same space and time. (Definition.) The girl learns that everything is relative. She learns that nothing is.

She is young and so it irks her because the maiden in the tower knows only one dimension: the down of fantasy. The rescue and the happy ending.

Harmony: A pretty word that is all too often, and unfortunately, misunderstood as agreement. But agreement = tolerance. Harmony does not = agreement. Harmony: A clashing of two minds existing side-by-side in rhythm, creating a weave. Because harmony can only be made of a minimum of two paths crossing, existing in tandem, tolerating each other and making something new with their differences so that the clashing resonates pleasantly.

Two universes from the same scene at the same time.

What is true?

"I am here for this," she says, indicating nature.

The young believe that can work. "This is why we can never work," he says. "Because I am all about bricks and stones. Ground, cement. How it all comes together on a Curriculum Vitae. And you - you're all about dreams and stars and nature. Full of passion. Too much passion."

"And you hate that?"

"I don't know."

"You hate what it does to you. Passion spilling out of everywhere. Your brick dam can't hold the water. You hate what it does to you. You don't know how to deal with feeling. You don't know how to take it."

"No." He isn't good at expression, but she knows him too well. A whole conversation goes on in a moment, only with a glance of the eyes.

No, he says, although no words are spoken. "I can't handle feeling. I break under emotion. I break under the weight of being human, so I avoid it. You are human enough for both of us."

He runs. Running consists of a turn of the head, silence, a walk in the other direction. But most of all, running consists of a staying in place when she is there waiting, across the room.

She grows up when she stops waiting.

She puts her words and her passion away like gloves in a drawer even though she knows perfectly well that a person's nature cannot be locked away like the Lost Boy's shadow. It breaks out. It conquers without any help.

She learns to create miracles instead of trusting in them. She learns not to be annoyed by four eyes looking on the same scene seeing two different universes. She learns to rejoice in it.

She learns that there is no other way between one human being and another. She learns that if a moment or series of moments seem to be a fairy tale, they are only extravagant pretty lies.

She decides to trust in bricks and leaves but keeps quiet about it. What she she sees with her own two eyes is a private celebration, a private parade, without the fanfare.

(Draft 2)

The only lover who ever touched me was the Muse,
with its pornographic imagery flaunting impossibility -
but its asexuality stroked me
while all the other lovers were too distant or
imaginary.

And so I drowned in its song,
in the waves of insanity that crucify sound
minds.
The Lover is that maddening melody, rising
and receding in waves across the windblown page.

But that Siren, the Muse, subdues passion with rage,
pulls my hand,
obliterates lust with desire,
and while time passes unseen I miss my life for its dreams
as the Muse continues its dance.

It is a lie that Artists are born with Chance,
born crippled and chained.

And who would take my other hand, unfettered by the Muse,
understand that comprehension pulls us farther apart?
Who would dare to love the absence that is me?

But enough of the brooding.

You must know: the worst of it is over, for we are young,
undone before we've begun.
Because no matter the depth or the distance,
or the time spent staring into the sun,
the Muse will always have my ear.

And who could be the one
to dig deep enough to release me from the Muse's sphere
that wraps itself around me in the sand?