my lover

[Billy]

Because we only have this, and we only have now and one day I will be parted from your loving company. I need you to know that truly and earnestly I love you. And many days from now when you are alone in your bed, wrinkled and worn with time and I have gone beyond your touch, I will have been one, and with you always in time. And nothing can take that from us, and though I will long to touch your skin and smell your hair and you will feel the same and we cannot, know this. I lived, a simple man, wounded and prideful, but you broke my pride upon the shores of your heart and I gave up the protections I built for myself in order to plant the seeds of my rebirth into your rich fertile soils. And although we exist in the shadow of death, every day your radiance shone through even the most treacherous of days, and white knuckled I clung to you for warmth and compassion. At times I was wrong, I hurt you and those are the only regrets I have in this life, that I let my pride wound you as I wounded myself. But at no time ever did I love you any less then at the zenith of our most fragrant youthful bliss, and I found in you a woman, whom I longed for and longed to be one with. A family, with roots growing deeper by day into a world rife with bittersweet partings, and lost in the scrambles of time and space, we existed here and now and I mourn for the loss you will feel when I go, and I bring those pains of joy with me into the ever after, I wish I could intertwine my life force to yours so we can be on the same bus to the ending of all experiences. But my sweet, those are the wishing of a flawed child, clinging to all I have loved. And though I am not afraid of losing this reality for whatever comes next, I just wish against wish and hope against all common sense that what comes after I will be there to wait for you and take your hand and be reunited again so that we will always be combined. Because the idea of an eternity apart is enough to crush the bravest of hearts and wound the strongest of us. I turn from such thoughts in appreciation that those days are yet to come, but today you are mine, today in the honeysuckle'd sweetness of our tender age, I belong to you, a devoted and helpless follower, obedient and lovesick, wanton and paphian. My meager feelings justify little, but I pray against un-faith that they suffice, my graceful consort, through this river of life.