I know what you're going through.

Perhaps you think I'm silly. You look at me with those disbelieving eyes, and with your hand on your throat, just barely, fingers grazing the skin. The light haloes you and you're a ghost, pale and shivering with everything you feel. It's so tight within you that sometimes you can't breathe. You make yourself tiny inside of it, because it fills you, it floods you, and what matters to you now is not your own being but the sunny, sunny warmth that surrounds you.

You're in love.

So much that it's killing you. So much that you do not exist beyond it. It makes you afraid to feel this way, afraid you're losing yourself inside of it, afraid it might slip away: it burns so brightly, you think it can't last. And yet you're more happy than you've ever been. You're in heaven; you're in hell.

I do understand. I've been in love.

Yes, it was a long time ago. I was young. I was different. Sometimes I didn't know how to live within my own skin.

He died in my arms.

I held him all night and sobbed and then I continued living.

But I still remember the smile that curled across his face: the knowledge and acceptance that he was embracing fate, and he said he was happy to have been able to die for me. What a wonderful thing, he said -- if you have to die, to die protecting what you cherish. And I pressed my fingers to his lips, to calm him, to quiet him, because I didn't want to hear his words and my tears were scalding down my face, down to him, that vast oceans of all those words I'd never spoken. Roses bloomed along my clothing as I clung to him, crimson twirling, copper and warm to my hesitant touch. Shh, he told me, with his hand on my face, but I couldn't silence myself: already I felt the softness of his fingers against my skin -- not tender now, but frail and fading.

There just wasn't enough time. For me, for him. I told myself it couldn't be real, I couldn't be clutching death, though I'd long ago become familiar with it. He couldn't be slowly slipping from me, his eyes become less clear each moment, his voice more faint.

I screamed for them to help me. That it wasn't supposed to end like this, this soon. Perhaps it wasn't fate -- perhaps this wasn't the time, but they waited for his death and so it called him. Perhaps he didn't have to die.

And I didn't let them say goodbye. I made him my own for those last few moments and the well of deep waters: emotion that bled through me in scorching grief. And then I closed his eyes, just a touch against his lashes, and I hated myself for not telling him, even though he knew. He should have heard it from my lips. I thought I could cheat death if I pretended not to know what I felt. I didn't want to burden him with my heart.

They must have thought me cold, for I never spoke of him again; I didn't cry after that day; I didn't change.

But neither did I ever love again.

Perhaps it was wrong of me. I didn't think it would be a betrayal to love another: I knew that much of love. It wasn't that I was afraid, or that there was not enough room in my heart, or that my pain was so great that I knew only it. Yet in all my life I've loved only him, and I've lived a long time. It just didn't stop.

I still catch him in a dream. I still catch him in the sunlight when I'm looking quickly, that bright, brilliant glow of a grin that always dimmed the world around him. All my life I've been waiting to find him again. All my life I've been waiting to see him again.

You don't have to be afraid.

It's painful, but it's real.

And it doesn't end; it can't be stopped, though a thousand vast oceans may split you apart. There will always be roses and rain and the thick whisper of words caught on the wind, words no one else can hear. I know. I've walked through the quiet fields and found reason.