That he could be so separate; that there could have been something else before.

That fact stuck itself in the cleft between them, and drove itself down deep.

Of course something had come before. Of course there were other things.

But it was too much. She had wanted to be vulnerable and intimate.

There was a barrier there now. Suddenly he was a stranger.

He didn't hurt her. It wasn't a cut or a calculated blow.

But it carried the substance of a lie, somehow.

She felt decieved, in that moment.

His otherness was confirmed.

But she still loved him,

whatever he was,

whoever he

might

be.

Love

Love comes in as a season.

In it, all things are practiced and new.

Each trepidation is tended,

Each sweet aching nods towards the sun.

The sun anticipates its transit,

treks the same peaks, sleeps still in the night.

The daylight and color and cold,

slip from the body of the world, as a breath,

and the terror of its passing grows small.

Cups.

We were made to be cups

and fold into each other.

To hold,

To form reciprocal shapes.

Oh, if I were a bird,

with arms only for flight.

At least once in our lives

we feel our eyes as hands.

Alone, we pray,

to conjure away imagined misfortune,

but mostly to precipitate

an unwavering love.

We knew it, in instants;

and its tiny life

tore a valley through the core.

I spend most days on the precipice,

charting lines, parsing the scar.