Author's Note: For those of you in any doubt, Aphotic is a word and it means not touched by light. A flower at the bottom of the ocean would be aphotic. In the same way, Mike is in this story, unotuched by the light, drowning in the darkness.

Aphotic

I guess I saw the world from a different angle.

When I was a child, I drew pictures in blacks and greys, not because they were all I had but because they were all I saw. The sky wasn’t blue and the grass was never green. The stars that shone in the midnight sky were palest white against the inky backdrop of space. The flowers that my mother grew in the garden were a vivid rainbow that seared my retinas and left my fingertips tingling, and yet still I drew them in blacks and greys, perfect replicas of their real counterparts, all bar the colour. The colours of my clothes fading into one another, dark green and pale brown, all turning to dust and the colour of my father’s car, his suit when he came home was charcoal, his smile wide and vivid white against his skin.

I was never popular. I was the kid at the back of the class, absorbing the words and drawing spirals, sketchy caricatures of the Varsity candidate. I was a stereotype, the weird one, the one that people spoke to but never really got to know. I was the kook and I had kooky friends. I was the kid with the bag full of pieces of paper, the one with his locker full of stickers and scribbled on note pads. I was the one who smiled amiably and lay low beneath the radar.

I was the kid with the excellent grades, the kid who barely studied or lifted his head all class. I was the kid who answered every question correctly but quietly so that people would forget it was him. I was the kid with the invisible circle surrounding him that nobody dared traverse. I sat alone at lunch times. I was the kid stuck firmly in the world inside of his head.

It was the same at college. I was the quirky alone boy, his hair falling like curtains around his eyes as he hid himself from view. I was the one with a quick smile and open charm, but startlingly, singularly lonesome. I worked and lived alone, I drove my own car, I listened to my own music. I was a clique that needed no extra members. It was me and that was all it had to be.

My entire life, I saw things from the other side of the line that defined their borders and boundaries. I saw them from the inside, felt their pain and their greyscale heartbreak. From the inside of solitary, mauve and taupe, ochre and rouge are colours for which there is no need. I never looked at a composition as merely there for my abuse, I saw its soul that echoed mine. My professors were shocked by my life drawing. ‘How?’ they begged to know when I showed them through lines and variations of grey that a ninety-year-old woman is more than just old. In her own mind, she is still beautiful, although she knows her body crumbles. In her own mind, she is Hollywood starlet from the Golden Era; she is Marilyn Monroe in white with striking eyes and feline grace, she is Marlene Dietrich and has sultry bedroom eyes just right. She is what she aspired to be, and she is crushed dreams, she is buried hope and unfulfilled needs. She is broken but she is still beautiful because she is not.

They could never understand why just living made me so unwell. They could never appreciate that all I felt every day of my life was an aching pain inside of me that I could neither erase nor crush. All I could do was accept it and use it to my advantage, to paint pain and longing, to picture heartache and suffering and to make them something beautiful. To incorporate my unrest into something wonderful.

I wandered hallways rank with loathing and dirty secrets. They sank into my pores and clogged my veins. I felt degraded and dirty every day of my life.

‘Dry your eyes,’ the girls would whisper as they passed me. ‘Smile, Michael.’ I would stare at them from behind long lashes, forcing a smile as I took in the stark lines of forced femininity. They could never be beautiful to me, none of them – their bleached hair and their rouged lips; they looked like dolls, porcelain dolls waiting to be plucked from the shelf. They would understand one day, their children screaming for toys and food, a baby on their hip and their black roots showing, they would appreciate the freedom they never allowed themselves to have. How could I be happy? How could I possibly continue to be when I was the only one who understood any of it?

The sun beat down on my cap as I pulled it low across my eyes, hiding from the world. I watched in absolute silence as the grass grew more and more yellow as summer wore itself out into Fall. I sat and saw the way the dust rose in arid puffs around people’s feet as they walked. I heard the protestation at the abuse and lifted not one finger. I echoed morosely the death of the flora that I could not appreciate. I faded as Fall came, the desolate beauty of my figure shining from beneath my pain drenched eyes.

I graduated the same as everybody else. I passed. I got through relatively unscathed. I was too ill to attend the presentation ceremony, and I had no want to go besides. College was little more than a prison, a means of keeping us out of harm’s way for another few years at least; concrete and asphalt, a wasteland of dead souls clamouring to be heard above one another, literally dying to make a difference. They don’t seem to understand though. Somebody has to sweep the roads; somebody has to clean their hallways. They cannot possibly all start their own business and become CEO.

*

“What do you do, Michael?”

He placed a glass full of whiskey and ice before me, a smile flickering on his lips. He was a rainbow, the first I had ever seen.

“I’m an artist.”

College down, the real world to go; I didn’t make plans but I had dreams. Plans could only fail because life has never conformed to the guidelines you give it. I had a vision of where I wanted to be. I had an inkling of what I wanted to do. I wanted to get out of the city – I wanted to live somewhere quiet, where there was sand and blue sea. I wanted to hear morning birds call and watch the sun set orange and red into the ocean as it stretched immense beyond my imagining. I wanted to awake to the grey dawn with cotton sheets across my body and my lover’s arms around me. I wanted nothing short of paradise.

I was on a long path to being that old woman, her crushed dreams and hollow despair. In my mind I would forever be that young man who saw so much before him. That young man who saw only the pitfalls already and the ways in which he would never awake to the wash of the ocean and the fresh salt smell of the sea.

“I sing.”

I nodded and poured sour mash down my throat, wincing as it burnt. He poured me another. I would come to understand that smile.

“You sing.”

He looked like he could do more than sing, but who was I to judge? I saw in his being the reds and mauves that had been missing my entire life; I knew that I had to hold on to him because he could keep me here as my body fought to leave. I knew that the man with the whiskey bottle clutched in his scarred hands would be the thing that kept me anchored.

“I also make a mean cup of coffee,” he offered and his laugh was as smooth as his voice, infectious and alive, summer in the midst of the winter of my years.

Who was he? And when did he arrive? I cannot remember the answer to either question. I was a regular face at the bar. The pallid communal misery of the middle-age pseudo drunks that cluttered the tables and chairs, that propped themselves up at the counter was my canvas. These here were my raw materials, their anxiety and tragedy worn carelessly on the outside as the inside and the memories were drowned in watery beer.

He worked behind the bar? Perhaps he did, he may have been a customer. For all I remember of his arrival, he was a whore asking for trouble. But he came in shades unknown, with a beauty I had never experienced before. His smile was opalescent and his eyes intriguing. He persisted with me for months before…

“Fuck… Oh, god, please…”

A white knuckle ride, my fingers clutching at the pillows beneath my head and the headboard behind me as he penetrated my body and engulfed my brain. It hurt beyond my wildest imagination, all the time in the world not enough to relax a body that could not bear the invasion of its privacy and the ransacking of its sanctity. My body is my temple, passion my religion, rapture my sin. All for what? For damp tears and a damp body, a hollow vacancy after the burning of his presence and the soothing of his climax. My body’s first experience of another mortal coil, and my tears could not abate.

He made me that coffee he said he was so good at. I hid beneath the bed sheets, trembling and keening for the innocence I had just destroyed.

When I managed at length to haul my broken soul from its self-absorbed misery, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor riffling through the loose-leaf pages of college sketchpads. He glanced at me as I entered and turned his eyes back to the pictures that lay spread before him, the storyboard of my life.

“It gets easier,” he whispered. “Every time.”

I nodded tiredly and shrugged my shoulders at him. So? There wasn’t going to be a next time. One facet of my dream destroyed already. There would be no lover to hold me in his arms in my house by the ocean. There would be none because I couldn’t be touched in that way. I sighed and stared at the carpet, the empty whiskey bottle beneath the chair and the half-empty wine bottle on the glass table, the rings of the coffee mugs on its sheer surface, the crinkled edges of month old magazines. He held up a drawing and gazed at me with glittering eyes. I stared at it, remembering when it was drawn and why; another assignment, me sitting in the summer sun with my back pressed against the yellow stones of the church, safe in the presence of god. I had stared with vacant detachment at the boy laying flowers at the grave I drew. I didn’t even realise he had been included until later when I shaded and completed the line sketches. I never looked at the name on the headstone.

“Who was she?”

He put the drawing down and shook his head. “He,” he murmured, staring at the picture. “He…”

He didn’t have to say a word. I knew and understood. Understanding a person is more than hearing what they say. It is hearing what they don’t say as well. He looked so much younger then, and so infinitely much more grey. Without that man, his life had moulded him into something completely different, something harder. Life had made him into a diabolical, riotous symphony in primary colours. He had grown in the last two years into a man, a man who was older and wiser than I would ever be. I felt a child in comparison, barely fit to call him brother much less lover.

“He was a friend, a guide. He was someone my mother knew and I loved him as a father.”

And still all I heard were the words between the lines, the words his lips could not utter and that his brown eyes showed. His eyes told of a deeper love, of a secret shared and never spoken. His eyes told the story of a boy, his life cluttered with memories and more to hide than I could imagine. His body spoke of a sorrow he could not articulate and was long past trying.

“He was your lover.”

It was not a question and the slump of his proud shoulders told me he knew as much. He inclined his head slightly and then met my eyes.

“He was my guide,” he whispered and put the picture away.

I felt no need to pursue the subject. I knew as much about him as I needed to know. He was my age and infinitely older; he was alive, beautiful… He was a stunning rainbow of experience and desire. In the two years between me leaning against a solid church wall to capture the broken and crumbling misery of the cemetery and that day as he smiled and told me it grew easier, he had become a new person. He had done what I could not. He had broken the bonds of what he was and become something altogether more appealing. He was a leader of men and they would follow him to death.

“Teach me how,” I breathed, silent piety seeping from my words as they passed my lips. I had found God; I knew his form now and would for ever more. I knew the names of the angels and how they sounded on unchaste lips. They sounded like his name as it passed into the spoken realm; they looked as he did set down in black lines.

“Teach you what?”

“Teach me to be what you are.”

He didn’t understand. I suppose I knew that he would not. I felt a blush rise in my cheeks as I crept closer to him, wrapping my arms around him as I buried my face against the side of his neck. His hands came to rest on the base of my spine and I shivered, terror coursing through me. I needed him and I knew that I could not just turn him aside, but I could not be what he was searching for. I felt as if I were only part of a man. Was it requisite to enjoy every aspect of being with him? I had no answers, only questions that nobody could answer.

Hours rolled by, becoming days and then, eventually, weeks. He was right; he was a singer. Rock and roll flowed through him, pure excess driven into every pore. The way he stood, slim hips thrust forward, hipbones protruding through whichever sheer top clung to his body. His angular frame was a picture book of his life, every scar telling its own story, every multi-coloured multi-faceted tattoo telling another. He would take me a lifetime to comprehend and emulate. I felt like a ball and chain around his neck, holding him back and dragging him down. I stopped going to see him perform. I would stay home, curled up in my bed watching the seconds go around, ticking away the minutes of my life. He would open the door quietly at one o’clock on the dot every single time. He would undress in the dark and press his lips to the nape of my neck, knowing that I was not asleep.

“I love you.”

And I would tremble as his hand found its place on my hip, fighting back the tears and waiting for oblivion to claim us both as its own. It was always the same. Maybe three nights in seven he would be gone. He would always invite me to come, he would always have a place for me, somewhere that I would not be squashed, somewhere that I could see him and he could see me, both of us knowing that every word was for me, every lyric echoed keenly in the emotion I felt. I was a freak; I knew it and he did not. I could not go and see girls, boys, men and women clamouring for his attention, clamouring and clawing the air to touch him, knowing that I had to opportunity to do what they wanted to do and that I turned it down night after night, that first burning pain etched onto my memory in fiery red.

“It gets easier.”

He repeated it over and over, and I would smile painfully. I would nod and he would sigh.

“Mike?”

“Mm?”

“You have to trust me.”

I had to wonder why people returned time and again to something that caused so much discomfort, so much pain. I could see nothing about it that made me want to try and erase that first experience, but his persistence was heart wrenching. I could no more turn him away time immemorial than I could forget that old woman, crushed dreams in her eyes. And so I watched the flickering minutes on the clock, 12.58, 12.59… One o’clock and the door creaked open. His feet were silent on the floorboards, the rustle of his clothing minimal. I felt the bed dip as he crawled beneath the sheets, pressing himself against my body as his lips pressed against my neck.

“I love you.”

And his hand found its place on my hip. I trembled as I rolled slowly to face him, not knowing what to do with my hands, how to touch him or where, and his brown eyes stared at me in the black of the night. I pressed a finger to his lips as they parted to speak, imploring him silently to say nothing. He didn’t say a word, he merely took control and I let him. He knew what to do. He knew me and my foibles, the pitfalls in my compliance. His fingers traced across my skin, burning trails following in their wake as I threw my head back, biting my lip as his tongue caressed my throat.

His hands pressed gently against my shoulders as he moved to sit astride my hips, arching his back as he bent down to flick his tongue against the hollow at the base of my throat, prominent as I sucked my breath in. My hands gripped at his legs as I screwed my eyes shut, throwing my head back to expose the clean lines of my neck to his teeth and his kisses. He groaned low against my skin, vibrating through me as his legs clamped against my sides. His touch was fire and ice as he worked slowly down my frame, kissing and sucking at my flesh. I whimpered, fighting back the tears that welled in my eyes. ‘Relax,’ he whispered, his breath a hot blast of air on the cool trail of his kisses, freezing my skin and then bringing more vividly to life. That word emblazoned itself in vivid hues across my mind as I gave in to his touch and the magic of his lips, his hands; to the thrill of having him touch me.

My hands moved to grip once more at the headboard as he slipped from my hips, pushing my legs apart with easy confidence. I whimpered his name and his hand immediately lay against my stomach, soothing and reassuring. I closed my eyes and sucked at my lower lip as tongue trailed lazily along the length of my erection, making my hips buck, my body rigid with anticipation and crying for attention. All the while, in the back of my mind, I harboured an innate fear of the moment his fingers would press against my opening, seeking entrance, seeking to take what I could barely bring myself to give.

He drove coherency from me as he accepted me into the warm cavern of his mouth, his rough fingers curling around me as he showed me a new brand of heaven. I bit my lip until I tasted the warm iron of my blood on my tongue, wrinkling my brow as tears tumbled from my eyes. My entire focus shifted to the coiling in my gut, the aching, writhing tension of denial that spread through my body until I longed only for release. My hips thrust up against his hand, and his free one came to rest upon my hip, his fingers tracing the outline of my hipbone as he groaned around me, shockwaves reverberating through my entire being. I heard his name pass my lips, a low whimpered sob as I gave up fighting pleasure and allowed myself instead to be its slave. For almost the first time in over twenty years, pleasure brought me colour; as I tumbled from the cliff top on which I teetered, I saw his body crouched between my legs in a riotous symphony. I tangled my hands in his hair as I dragged him back up my body to kiss him hungrily, tasting musk sweat and myself on his lips and in his mouth.

“I love you,” I whispered once more and he smiled as he pulled away.

I felt beyond selfish when he slipped from our room. I knew where he went, and I wanted to stop him except I couldn’t form the words. I didn’t know how to show him what he had shown me, and he knew better than to push me further. I rolled onto my side, curling into a ball and waited for him to pull the sheets back over me when he returned. When his hand rested on my hip, I rolled over and ran my hand down his chest, fingertips just brushing his skin.

“I am sorry,” I whispered. He said nothing, only pulled me closer and whispered that I should sleep.

*

He was my encouragement, the stable part of a life that felt too much. He was the opposite of me. He was innuendo and excess, an extrovert and extravagant. He smoked, he drank and crucially, he didn’t care. He sat with his bare feet curled under him on the cream coloured sofa, drinking straight whiskey and flicking cigarette ash into the ashtray that rested on the arm beside him. He laughed at nothing and ran his hands through his hair, complaining that the material was cold against his skin.

“Then you should dress,” I murmured, running my finger around the top of another empty wine bottle that I had spent hours peeling the label from. I stared up at the rotating blades of the ceiling fan, listening to its quiet hum, the swish as particles were shorn in two. I stretched lazily and sat up slowly, rolling the bottle back under the table where I had found it. If I left it there I would have the joy of finding it once more.

He slid from the sofa, landing on his hands and knees in the depths of the carpet. He laughed and bit his lip as he glanced at me sidelong, wrinkling his nose. “What’s the time?”

“Time you got dressed.” But I couldn’t let him leave, not when he sat in front of me wearing just his boxers. He threw his head back briefly and then met my eyes.

“You’re so stupid,” he said and I nodded.

They say time passes quickly when you are having fun. Certainly months rolled into years, and still his rainbow didn’t fade. He encompassed my being within his own, begging me to come to see him, begging me to watch him come alive once more. I held his face in my hands as I lay feather kisses against his eyelids. I still couldn’t make myself watch the suffering of those people who could not touch him, who failed to recognise their own aching pitiful trauma when they mistook it so readily for love. I could no more watch it than they could understand my reticence, the way I turned him away.

He told me he had a surprise and he led me blindfolded to his car. I clutched at his arm and begged him to tell me. He laughed and caught my lips with a fleeting kiss.

“Trust me,” he told me for the millionth time, and this time I knew that I did. I trusted him implicitly, knew that he respected me enough never to see me hurt. I told him as much and I felt his hands against my spine as his body pressed against mine, his lips against my neck. He drove for miles, hour upon endless hour before he stopped the car, and only then did he pull the blindfold from my eyes and my hand flew immediately to my mouth, the vista before me sinking into my skin as tears pooled like the blue swell of the ocean.

“I knew you would love it,” he whispered as I turned silently towards him, burying my face against the crook of his shoulder, clinging to him before the uncorrupted beauty of his beachside paradise overwhelmed me. “I saw it, and I knew it would be perfect.”

I glanced up and met his eyes and he smiled his dazzling smile before kissing me gently. “I love you,” I whispered against his lips and he closed his eyes, allowing himself to absorb those words.

He sat with me amongst the sand dunes, watching the waves as they lapped against the shore. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him, kissing my hair as I rested my head against his shoulder. He said that he felt peaceful and I glanced up to meet his eyes, searching for the lie I heard whenever anyone said they knew why I wanted this, only this time I couldn’t see it anywhere. I searched his face thoroughly and he smiled at me, blinking slowly from behind his glasses. With careful fingers, I pulled them from his face and rose to my knees, clasping his face between my hands as I lay soft kisses against his eyelids. His hands tightened against my spine, his breath a small explosion against my throat.

When I awoke, his arm was draped across my body and the pale dawn shimmered against the gossamer cloth hanging at the window of this cabin, the cabin I saw in my mind when I pictured this place. I felt those familiar tears well in my eyes once again as I turned slowly towards him and saw his eyes staring back at me. I lay my hand against his cheek and traced the line of his jaw idly. I never wanted to let him go, and I didn’t want to know how he had led me here, to this place. All I wanted to do was live it, to smell the salt in the air and hear the birds as they circled in quiet flight above the world, their wingtips brushing against celestial heavens, imbued with beauty beyond compare. He rolled onto his back and stretched lazily before gazing at me. I gazed back through the hazy film of my tears. Any words would spoil this moment and I wanted to capture its watery blues and morning purples forever, unspoilt and perfect as they were now.

His feet were silent on the floor as he padded from the room. His boxers were low on his hips, his muscles moving beneath the translucent film of his skin and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. He was everything I had ever dreamt of, everything to which I had given thought or prayer. I could never believe in a god, but I knew I had found my religion. He was everything I needed to stay alive, the entire reason that the dawn was worth waiting for. And here with him, in this shack beside the sea with its ragged curtains and the distant sound of water washing against the sand, here I knew at last the eternal piece that my ravished soul longed for.

We couldn’t stay forever. He pressed his fingers against my lips and smiled sadly at me. I stared back and then dropped my eyes to the floor. He said he had to go back to the city, that there were people relying on him, but that this haven would be ours – that it would be mine, as often as he could bring me. I sat in the sand once more as he threw our belongings back into the car. My sheets and my pillows, packed without me even realising they were gone. He called me and, when I didn’t respond, he knelt behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders as he stared along the horizon with me.

“We have to leave eventually,” he whispered against my ear and I leant back against him, nodding slowly.

“I know.”

He guided me to my feet and dusted the sand from my pants. His laugh was reassuringly real as I felt my world slipping through my fingers, losing itself in the grains beneath my feet, grains with the potential to be more – glass through which I could view the world, tint it pink and erase the stains. I held his hand and he didn’t pull away, easy in the knowledge of who and what he was. I clung to him, my rock, my anchor, the one constant in the shifting shapelessness of my life.

He made a promise to me before I would get in the car. I made him promise to bring me back every Saturday until he couldn’t anymore. He laughed at me and I stared back, wrapping my arms around myself defiantly, sniffing. He nodded just once and said that for as long as he could drive me, he would bring me here and hold me as we listened to the waves and cry of the gulls.

He told me that I had to do something, said that I needed to drag myself from my own world. He pointed out that I could draw, why not put it to some use? I argued that no one would be interested and no one would care. To prove me wrong, he brought a friend home one night and showed her my drawings. She offered me a small fortune in my eyes for something I had sketched on the memory of a dream. I told her I couldn’t take her money but that she should keep the drawing. It meant nothing to me. Like all my other pieces, save the ones Chester insisted on displaying, it was kept locked away in the cabinet by the front door, beneath the mirror that cast back at me the warped image of my face, black eyes bleeding caramel tears down my cheeks so often, too often.

Chester loved surprises. He laughed as he led me once more by the hands, swaying too and fro in time to the music in his soul, dancing to his own private tune. Fiddle pipe and drum. I envied him that and his hands caught my hips as he swayed close against me, his lips whispering against my eyelids to just let go, to give myself over to him and to passion. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pressed myself flush against him.

“I have something for you,” I whispered and he pulled back, gazing at me with intrigued, piqued curiosity glittering in the glorious and unplumbed depths of his eyes.

“For me?”

I nodded and tugged myself from the easy grip of his fingers, pressing my back against the door of the studio he’d had fitted for me to work in, a beautiful room overlooking the garden. In the spring, cherry blossom piled against the floor length dormer windows. Their beauty made me sad as well, and I drew them in the palest pastels, working them into a larger picture, the landscape beyond the edges of the garden, beyond the edges of the world. He would run his hands around my waist and rest his chin on my shoulder as he watched me working, brushing his lips against my neck as he whispered those immortal words into my skin, emblazoning them on my mind once more, as he did every time that he felt their power fade. In the summer, the sun sparkled on the panes of glass and the dust motes refracted in those rays. I photographed the dust and hung the pictures throughout the house. They made me smile when I remembered the gold that cast shadows on the floor, a memory to add to the millions I carried with me. In the winter, the sun was weaker and the days marginally shorter. We used to sit together beneath the bare cherry blossom tree as I lay my head against his shoulder. He always had time for me, always took five minutes from his schedule to sit with me and just talk.

“For you,” I repeated as I slipped inside of the room, closing the door quietly behind me. I rested my head back against it before rummaging through the piles of discarded and half finished pieces that lined the walls of my studio before finding the piece I wanted. I held it up and tilted my head, chewing my lip as I took stock of what I had to give him. I had painted it from memory, line sketches done whilst he slept and I could not. I had filled in the details, his arm thrown casually across the pillow as he buried his face in the crook of his elbow. His sheets pooled around the base of his spine, the muscles of his back stretched taut beneath his skin as he slept, resplendent in silent repose. I didn’t know how he would respond, but I knew I wanted to give it to him.

He sat against the wall, staring at the door when I emerged. Immediately his smile lit up his eyes and he clambered back to his feet, gazing at the canvas I held in hands. I closed my eyes and held it out to him. I swallowed painfully and took a deep, shaky breath. “I love you,” I told him, reaffirming the words in my head. “Happy birthday.”

How many years ago was that? How many years have passed since you brought me a reason to live, a means of seeing and appreciating the colours that bloomed around me? I know that now I sit here in these dunes staring out to sea, watching the waves as they wash against the shore and I think of you, the way your hands rested against my stomach as I sat between your legs. I remember how warm your body felt beneath mine as I lay on top of you, pressed against you as I tasted your lips and smiled openly, kissing your eyelids as you did mine. Seasons passed as a blur, your support everything I needed to see one day finish and another begin. So long as you returned at one am and pressed your body to mine as your lips grazed my neck, I was happy and content.

This was our special place. You asked to be cremated and this is where I brought you, emptying your ashes onto the wind and letting it carry you out to sea. The gulls circled overhead and I lay in the bed we had shared so many times together, tears rolling down my cheeks. You were my everything for my entire life and I knew there would be no going on without you. Only somehow I have managed these last few months without your presence there, without your hand to guide me and show me the way that would save me. I hear your voice and, written in red across my mind, I see your words. I love you too, Chester. I always did.

I can’t continue to live in the house without you. I sell all of our belongings. I even sell all of my paintings. You would be proud of me. I have horded them for decades and now that I am old as well, I no longer need them. I had my life with you, and now I wait for my time of year, for my December and its short grey days to claim me for itself. The blue of the ocean and the gold of the sand; if I fell asleep here and never woke up, it would be with the surety that I had the best life possible…

Fin