#inall

Today.

Today when you arrived at the doorstep of my house, I was not yet stirred. I lay in my bed's sweet embrace, on the threshhold of sleep, counting stars among the skies. You, unknowingly, wished me awake. You called for me when I could not hear you.

Undefeated, still, you climbed the ivy vines and waited for me by the sill. I did not feel the prescence of a shadow against my skin, but you were there to wake me once again.

"Awake!" a pleading cry rang out. "My love, I'm here for you."

Your cloying kiss had met my lips just twice before- once in the idyllic treeline down the road, the other while we danced while a cold winter snowed. And now, yet again, and this time, it is as I awake that I see your face before I see another.

"I'm so terribly sorry," you cry. "I didn't mean to surprise you."

"You did nothing of the sort," I lied. You pace around my still darkned room. "Well, besides, I thought we could venture out today. If you were willing, anyway. I know it is early, and I know the moon is still aglow, but I have something to show you!"

I sit up straighter, my hands holding me up on my bed. Anticipation fills my voice- "How exciting! What is this dazzlingly mysterious something you speak of?"

Dreaming of you consumes all the time I have and do not have.

Every tear that escapes from the cold inside my eyes is not out of love. Alas, it is anger that now resides in me.

What you've done to me, what I've done for you-

You grasped the thread that unwound itself and dangled from my heart, and you spun me around and around in a dance so lovely it became like a dream. Though we danced and it was beautiful, I felt my heart unraveling as you brought me into paradise. Seconds become years in the eyes of those who have felt a love at their lowest. Time is a concept to me, and I will never know what it feels like to believe otherwise.

Grace me with a slow movement of your hand across the nape of my neck, where sin and lips collide, in silence as to the eyes that meet and cry for each other's sake. Slow are the fingers that trace over my jaw and cheek, as I quietly tell you of my love. You and your disdain for the times I separate you from my arms, me and my soft breaths as you and I illustrate our way through a tragedy, soft like death, but harsh like winters caress.

But when we fall down in white linen and dance in the dark of the night, and I kiss you upon the thunder roaring in my ears, and I kiss you when the lighting flashes in your eyes, and when I kiss you again and again until the music stops- I will forever love you. Because you loved the bones beneath my skin and the smile across my lips; the way you loved the color of fall- the way you loved a baby's laugh.

The same way I loved you when I knew you loved me back.

I have come to the happy conclusion that once more, I might be able to feel love again.

I endlessly doubt myself and feel as though I will never be able to achieve a state of romance so great that I forget the names of all the people who have wronged me. Instead, I feel as though I am deprived of touch, deprived of loving words. And I am. I truly am. It belittles me so whenever the barren land appears more handsome than I. I believe it to be unfair, and so tragically it has been proven.

But when you are there, you silence the earth with a beauty so unjust that all the world mourns its loss. I pray that one day, if it be in truth, you will spare me and keep me, throwing out regards to my inferior appearance. You, my love, are like the morning sun, and it pains me to see such a rose bloom in a world that takes away things like pride and joy.