I can’t trust my brain to preserve you. Every home before you stays a fuzzy blur. Warm and shining and beautiful, but all the details are gone. A faded fineline tattoo, cloth in the sun. 

Nor can I trust the world to keep me here. No matter how ardently I have wished to swim back upstream through time like some kind of desperate temporal salmon, there is nothing that will stall the current. I have to leave you. I don’t want to, I never wanted to, but I have to.

So I’m making you a home here instead.

 

Outside the fallible flesh that encases the flickers of tiny lightning that become my thoughts. Somewhere I can return in perfect shining detail as long as there exists a digital vessel to hold you, rainbows across crystals laid liquid-flat becoming light and truth and every content of my heart.

I can’t stop time but I can hold you in a place I can carry no matter how much time passes.

Isn’t that what so many of us beg for, in the end? To be able to mold time like liquid metal, or in the absence of such power, to preserve what we love away from its molten unceasing current?

Help me. Take my hand. Take this story. Whatever place it occupies in your heart, big or small. Whether it lives forever or not. Just knowing it touched another soul for a moment is enough.

Knowing my shining aurora of a home gets the immortality I cannot give it in the temporal world by living in your heart is more than enough.

Thank you for holding this with me. Each step into the future feels a little lighter knowing creation is my back door past Time’s sentinels. Perhaps not perfect or perfectly immortal, but stronger than this body and this circumstance. The hands that made alongside you now use their power to make a place for you. My love is here, and that’s what matters.

Hold your love wherever your heart feels most drawn to pouring it. Create not just to produce an artifact, but as a transcendental act. Ease the weight of the unknown future by singing gratitude to a shining past, and take a deep breath on the threshold of the present with me.

I’ll feel your glow on the other side.