She

She walks freely and unannounced through your everyday consciousness like a lucid dream. Your eyes trace her naked shoulders, the contours of her face as she sleeps. Her eyes flutter awake, look up at you. She grins into the pillow and hums contentedly. Your fingers fall through thin air as you reach out to touch her, memory receding into longing. You can’t keep her name from escaping your lips, until others know your story almost as well as you do, can repeat events, draw upon your memories to characterize their experience. They can’t understand how it felt to love and be loved by her - to share days, weeks, years of time without a second thought at its passing; to be held in her gaze as completely as in her arms; to hear her voice in your ears and feel her thoughts in your head as you read her facial expressions, her body movements, her subtext. You’ve spent every moment since fighting your way through the definition of others in terms of “her” and “not her”. Discarded “not her”s scatter your romantic landscape. I’ve been one of those. I’ve been her. I’m “not her”.