I am your reader and you are my listener. I am a wanderer and I can not tell you where I have come from because you could not believe it nor accept it. Shall I sing?  Listen to a song you have never heard before and yet, it seems familiar, distant, a memory. From where you are sitting, look beyond me and around me. You see deep blue falling on the walls and shadows of lighter blue drifting in through the windows. You hear water, windblown water falling outside the walls, a constant sound of the sea breathing into the land.

Along the land, the coastal land, as the summer ends, a new summer begins. The nights are colder, the sun is weaker, but the sea is still warm. In the warmth of the afternoon, I walk along the grass-to-sand edge of the house, circling it, painting a fence around it with my body, protecting it. She is asleep inside, I am awake.

For ten years we were lovers… an affair of the heart, I called it. But you are a thief of hearts, she would say. And what are you, I would say, my victim? No, she would whisper, your loot.

For ten years we touched each other's skin, we slept together and bathed together. We stared into each other's eyes until our eyes went dark. We whispered our names in a thousand different phrases, in a hundred gestures, in silences that flooded the memory with music. We went to places, walked along streets, lonely together because we couldn't share with other people. Afraid to share, afraid to lose a moment, because above all, our passion for each other glowed… green like sea fire, glimmering like a delicate, thin glass, floating on our fingertips, buoyant from our breath, waiting to shatter if either of us so much as blinked. We believed, I believed, that one day we would fall asleep together and never wake up. We would cross from white to black… no shades or colors in between… the most dangerous expense of life.

Then it came. Now she is asleep, falling asleep… and I am awake.