One

One is the sunlight that breaches the silence of daybreak, like a whisper shaking off the muteness of the dark, urging you to awaken to the nascent fog because another gentle day is at the cusp of your dream. The past summer has been harsh, unforgiving in its tropical heat, but your kindness delivers the comfort that can dampen even the driest of hearts, famished in so many ways by willful solitude, yet cured on so many mornings by the touch of your hand. Life was only a dream, until you happened. Now, I can open my eyes to how real everything has become. If only I can, I do not wish to sleep. I cannot afford to blink in the midst of this happiness.

The days are different, but one is Sunday becoming everyday. So it must be: you are my endless Sabbath. You are the rest that I deserve in this weary existence. I can taste the flavor of life in your lips, so I nourish myself with you, breathe you as though I am drowning. But the waters are tranquil and I find myself ashore in the safety of your embrace.

One is presence neither encumbered nor interrupted by episodes of momentary separation. We cannot be together all the time, but space hardly breaches the continuity of your memory. It lingers in me. It fills me like a river emptying itself into the high seas. And in the abundance of you in my mind, I see everything in you. I see you in everything, too, the way a compass would always point to where you are. The north that you have become is the south that I will be. We are not polar opposites, because in the grander scheme of things we are the same direction we both need. Wherever we may travel, we are bound to find ourselves: you in me, and I in you.

One is the absence of doubt. This is clarity, and it demands neither public recognition nor approval. It is complete in its own right. What we have does not depend on the appraisal of the world. What we have is the world. We are what we have.

One is the antecedent of nothingness, and it presages truths as ancient as the language of prayer, and through your lips my world begins the moment you speak. When you say stories I have yet to hear, I let my mind commune with your words, for there is nothing more divine than the acceptance of the thoughts you hold dear, and I receive them like a gift that validates the worth of the only life I will ever have. Should fate be kind enough, I will live the rest of my days with you and your thoughts. Nothing more, nothing less, and I am satisfied.

One is a story of twelve months and two lives accompanied by the kind of music that only the heart can hear, of songs turning endless long after the night has shushed half of the world, and of our hands held tight in a world where nothing stays, because truth be told there is just the two of us in the oneness of it all.



For Kae.