I went down to the river to pray that day. The water shakes with every breath you take and I watch my reflection ripple where you once were. Winter’s hands are only just starting to release so that spring can finally breathe. I tell you it’ll be freezing, but you’re stripping off your sweater as you run to the bank. You kick off your shoes into the sand, pulling denim down to your ankles and trying not to trip over it. I’m laughing as you turn back to grin and then dive in, winking at me. “Come on –it feels nice!” Your hair is slicked on your forehead and sun spots dapple your shoulders. I shake my head, setting my bag down in the grass. “Bullshit. It’s freezing and you know it.” “Yeah but I’ll be here to warm you up.” The river laps at your chest. “Please?” and you say it in a way that has me pulling my t-shirt over my head and trying to laugh off the way you look at me. 

“You’re so beautiful,” is all you say when I join you. My teeth are chattering and the laugh is frozen in the back of my throat. I kiss your cheek, light and chaste. There are water droplets freckling my face and the world could slip right out from under us — the pull of a wave as we stand waist deep. I’m thinking of how you could say anything to me when your hands turn me into the sand at our feet. You press your lips to my forehead and then flick water across my nose, laughing at the way I gasp. 

Later that night, my lips are raspberry bruised and I’m trying to think of all the ways to tell you I love you. But I’m sitting on your bed bare-chested and rabbit-hearted and wishing my memory wasn’t as good. I am trying so hard to wish away a time from so many seasons ago. I know that the past is only a form of prologue, yet I’m still picking the skin off my lips and gnawing the inside of my cheek. 

I think of you when the night is heavier than my spine can bear – when my lips are chapped red and my breath smells of sour sleep and liquid tylenol. However, It’s spring’s first fresh dawn and I’m beginning to regain the color under my eyes. I dreamt of sitting on the floor by your bedside, pressing my lips to your wrist hanging over the edge, of speaking against your skin, against your pulse, so that maybe it will echo back into me. That way I know I’ll hear everything I ever need to. I don’t know how to tell you to please just hold me as if I’m a part of something bigger and ask me my mother’s maiden name, but until the words come, I’ll trace the letters across the small of your back and speak to you in dreams. 

We take the train that weekend to go somewhere larger than ourselves. You hold my hand as you cross the street before the light turns red, and we pretend that we have it all figured out. You don’t complain as the sky begins to tear up, instead pulling a twenty out of your wallet to buy fresh flowers from a man on the street corner. The simple things will get us by, and we’ll laugh until we fall asleep every night. And maybe at some point, all we’ll know is long golden light and clumsy kisses and fresh flowers in the windowsill. 

It takes me days to recover from a dream of you. It’s what I think when I wake up and see that you’re not next to me but especially when you are. It takes me everything to not tell you that even when I close my eyes, you are still there. I wish for nothing more than sunlight and steady dreaming – I promise that one of these days we’ll be barefoot and sundazed. 

I promise I’m trying to catch my breath on all the love that is waiting for me, for I know that I am being cradled by the tide, not swept away. You have star fragments across your shoulders and lights string from your hand to the side of my cheek when you wish me goodnight. The Earth begins to rock below the fireflies and a shimmering evening sky. Let summer sing us into sleep and I’ll love while the flowers bloom and keep doing so into June.