If I could retrace every step I’ve taken, every footfall
falling after the materialization of consciousness
from that state of abstract impressions and swirls of color
into the consciousness which aches now, knowing
that time swept past us, leaving behind its sediment
occluding the possibility of this moment existing
before so much debris and heartache.
If pulse and breath conspired to sway the winds
and sweep the sands within the hourglass,
to cause the frame to shatter, loosening the moments,
freeing the past and its predications on the present,
allowing the story to be rewritten into the story
we should have lived, the one we would have written,
to lead us here, to this moonlight.
If holding you, here, close, in its sparse light
could heal us both and heal the consequence imposed
by time, changing, if nothing else, those moments,
which linger through time and experience, like
aggrieved wayward spirits clamoring for attention,
disrupting the serene moments of slumber, and
mitigating the promise of the moment.
If consciousness were made of the same matter as
the material we were when there was no distinction
between you or I, when there was no light to see by,
when in the darkness even the nascent stars could not
find their form, when time did not have seconds,
when you and I formed our only reality, when we existed
perfectly as we should have in each breath since.
And you breathe in the night’s stillness, my arms
healing in the warmth they should have known always,
our bodies pressed together, interlocking, the way
unique puzzle pieces fit only each other, as the comfort
floods us, that knowledge that only in each other do we find
what we had before we had breath, what we had when
we felt most resonant, and what we’ve found again.
As the moonlight becomes swallowed by that opacity
of the darkness before the dawn, and you sleep,
I memorize the contours of your body with my lips,
I place each promise of my love on the surface of your skin,
I begin to long for the next moonlit moment we’ll share.