I often find myself tied between the frames of my own reality, swaying between the certain and the feverish captivity of what is beyond. Voices and hands grasp, pulling me from side to side, but I stay straddled in the middle. 

The frame creaks and bends as forces move but I remain bolted to the bland white walls that are both blinding and imminently intriguing. My dreams, aspirations, and desires for justice lie on one side, the ducks all in a row waiting for me to dive headfirst. You lie on the other. 

My mind prevents me from walking into the imminent success of my future due to your ever lingering presence in my subconscious. All-consuming and devouring my ability to move from the frame into the future. I beg you to leave and let me journey into the beyond, but your hand grazes my face, my cheeks molding into the crevices of your palm. 

My anger dissipates into the pools of your eyes as they stare longer and longer into the mysterious crystal blue. I do flipturns and backflips in the irises that possess me, my brain smoothing over in your ability to calm my feverish and innate anxiety. I sit there in the irises and milky whites until you blink, my new reality imploding just as fast as it was created. 

My hands touch the skin of your face as if one hard tap will make or break the perfect porcelain doll. As my pulse matches yours, I worry the pace of my heart will break your beauty and send you into a shock. My emotions feel powerful and destructive like a bull running to the red flag that controls its every movement. You sense my heart quicken and race grasping at my hand like

an anchor but in reality the red flag blinds my vision even more immensely and my heart flutters, skips, and pounds making every movement irrational and uncontrollable. 

I thrash and jolt in an attempt to recover from the overwhelming calm that juxtaposes my natural being but my body doesn’t move. Rather it stays still under the control of your hand in mine as it traces the creases and intersections across my palm. You study and follow them as if chartering the path and journey of my eternal being, finding the location you join in, when we both know your presence is across it. As the fingers of your hand meet the spaces where mine lack, my heart recovers from the adrenaline that pierces the lining from the inside out. 

My eyes flutter closed as if cursed to an eternal slumber only to be awakened by your touch. You look and pry at the scar on my eyebrow touching it softly and gently, asking question after question about its origin. Staring not breaking eye contact, I reveal my memoir. Each page-turning detail you treat as if it changes the ending of your own story, feeling my emotions with me as they fall and rise with every life-altering moment. 

As the story concludes, your lips outline the scar as if you seal our special place from the fear that lies beyond the protection of our beings. As you lean back, I fall into your presence, my head fitting perfectly in the craters of your shoulder blades, born to hold the place that carries the memories and thoughts of you. You hold me and speak your truth. Talking about kaleidoscopes and Picasso to your dreams and fears. You talk about everything. Sharing every detail as I uncover more to love.

You take breaks from your speech to interlock stares into the depths of my murky brown waters that you instantly turn translucent and pure. I make comments here and there as if hoping to add my own details to your story, and you grin the ends of your mouth touching the clouds above us. 

Your thumb presses the sides of your mouth as if studying the words they have and will say caring about every vowel and consonant. 

You start to speak the words, starting with I and L, but it ends with you getting up and never seeing me again.