I hold you close, my skin against yours
or our skin against the fabric of clothes
pressed between us, collapsing space;
as I do, I wish we could collapse time,
reach back the way only memory can,
dust off and revise those moments long past
when possibility remain unmitigated by time,
when our paths should have first crossed.
I hold you close, now, in stolen moments,
as the days progress, as the narratives,
those we set in motion in that space between
here and those long past breaths of childhood,
continue unfolding their present path;
I hold you close because there’s the sense
that time was stolen from us for so long,
and what remains may not stretch as far.
I hold you close, pulling you in because
it is the echo of your heart I feel beating
in the chambers of mine, it is the breath
of your breath that most reminds me
of that space before heart beats,
before time became finite and measured,
where there was no need to pull you in
because there was no closer we could be.
I hold you close, because I am drawn to you
with every bit of what I am, the way that
every molecule in the ocean responds to the moon;
I hold you because you have always been
the reason my heart beats, the song which
I so longed to hear, as our souls return
to the reverberation we had once known,
and I hold you close…