I love you in fiction

I long to create the beauty and passion I see inside my reflective soul. It flutters inside me--the deepest hope--and yet it is too delicate to be released into the wilderness of the public. I can see vast, empty plains stretched out colorless and desolate under the star-encrusted blue. The midnight air envelops me in aloneness, in the sense that my heart beats for desires, the objects of which do not exist...perhaps not yet, perhaps not ever.

My soul stretches outward for this sense of romanticism that never had any root in reality. I was alone in the understanding that my dreams were real and that my heart could be opened to reveal the fulfillment of some deep longing. I am unable to move beyond the sensibility of my own disappointment and all of my faculties shrink from the creation of characters when I cannot suspend my belief that true love and deeply imaginative qualities could exist outside of my own head. And how could an audience believe what the creator does not believe in?

Now what? I ask myself. Can I create my passion in words for my readers' passing glimpse into my soul? But there is only one reader who needs a glimpse into my deepest heart, and yet I exist only in the depths of my own soul and see nothing but emptiness and hear nothing but the echo of my own voice reverberating off the distant walls of my universe. I have loved many, indeed. Tiny pieces of each love are now permanently embedded in the soft flesh of my interior, cutting me still and crusting over to make them part of my walls.

But you...

You inspire all my loves, and you healed me from every heartbreak and took me prisoner in the depths of your own soul. Through so many years I've collected all the pieces of you that I could never have in you, so I found them in other people. I can never have you; you belong perpetually anywhere but with me. It is not my choice to take you for my own, but in truth, you already do belong to me. The embodiment of my very earliest dreams stands before me now and flits away again another moment later.

I love you, everything that forms the make-up of your being, and my collection of all your pieces is like a hopeless puzzle that could never be recreated. Your fragments pile like crumbled remnants in a flimsy shoebox within my heart, lying at the foot of a shrine that awaits your presence. The other loves come filing through, their admission often a trick of the eye, a note of their laughter, the tone of an admiring phrase, a quirk in their humor, the love of a book, the knot of a tie, the twinkle of an eye...anything that implies "you" in the "themness." But it never works, because they are never you, and I can't seem to give you up...not "you" merely in the essential pieces of your nature, but you yourself, all of you together as a whole man. You're all I've ever wanted.

Your fear of loneliness is the very thing that keeps me from you; you hold yourself away in your own world, barring me from it. Don't you know I would hold you forever, would keep your loneliness away? Your kisses still tingle on my lips, and your arms still warm me even when they are gone from me. You are always leaving, but you always remain in my heart. Other love is often a distraction, an attempt to replace what is irreplaceable. I run around in circles chasing after dreams, but my dreams are always running ahead of me and just out of reach.

It seems as though we exist in parallel universes, for we are together in another life, I know. The depth of my love for you shows me the intricacies of our subterranean connections. I long for you and yet I possess you; you reach for me but I am already yours--always. We meet eyes in understanding of the depth and impossibility of our love. We are approach and retreat, like the waves of the sea. When it's time for your approach, it's my time for retreat, and when it's my time to crash on the shore like a fierce wave, the shore is no where to be found. Once in a while, like the rise of a tide in the storm we meet, for a desperate moment amid the surf, and then it ends. I wonder with a sigh if our time will ever come, or if we are doomed to failure like the black and stormy seas.

One night, one quiet night, a storm rose on the calm seas and the surface was disturbed. You spoke your thoughts, and you laid your heart against mine. I loved you, with all the passion of years, and I poured my love upon you; you received it and you returned it. I can still feel your fingers in my hair, your arms around my body, your hands against my skin, your lips against my mouth. I can feel the abandon with which you kissed me, the tenderness in the touch of your lips upon my throat, and then I feel nothing but the burn inside my chest that reminds me it was real.

It ended like it never began, with only a tiny glint of "I'm sorry, not now," in your eyes. And so I let it go, but not without sadness, and not without the wrenching pain of removing something inextricably bound to me.

Although you are gone again, I still hold you in my dreams, remembering the sweetness of your sleeping head upon my shoulder and my lips upon your brow.

Soon, I will move toward other loves, when I find pieces of you worth pursuing, and when you want me, I'll be gone again. Why must it always be so backward when in our hearts we always want each other. For some unknown reason we always deny ourselves. I'll be living on your kisses for a while...and I do not expect to find a new you. There is no replacement.

And still you will live with me in my heart, in the pieces of you I find in others, and in the pages of my books.