-A momentary peace, not your own, as if the world depended on that warmth, on the warmth which turns cold in an instant, when your own is no longer enough. And broken I remain there, my arms around her, her beating heart. My senses fed by her essence, her scent. And I am lost. Lost in her, lost with her, though she does not care about me or the state I find myself in, as long as she feels her being lost is not loss because there is someone there.
I try to break free, but my arms do not wish to move that her warmth be their sustenance. There is a sensation which courses through me, when I am near her, a sensation of life meaning something, which is a lot more than what it has meant before those moments of shared breath. Her skin is salvation. Or rather salvation is found in her skin. My mind repeats this even as I fight thought, I do not hear the silent words swept through the crevices of my consciousness, but they convince me nonetheless. My arms remain wapped around her, a temple, the shrine at which I lose all composure and strength abandons me. I am broken. In those moments, oblivious to her indifference, she is my healing salve, she is the incantation which saves me.
That most ambiguous word issues forth once more, a little empty, as before. She gets up and loosens my arms around her. Her life, her world, must continue. I am not yet a part of that world, though my arms intrude and take hold of her, or atempt to hold her and perhaps, become a part of her, a part of her world. And as she goes, her movement parting the air, the air fills in the spaces where she has been and its chill is all I am left with. And the question surfaces, though it struggle to become breath, “why me, why so weak?” I suffer once more with that sensation of emptiness, that incompleteness which plagues my soul, and somehow, for some reason, though she leaves, I can conceive of no one else being the healing of my arms.
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