It's Friday morning. She was naked in bed when I left her, and I'm staring at a pixellated screen, mouth dry from sleep, wishing I was lying behind her. My cheek would be warm against her shoulderblade, listening to her breathe. If her skin was exposed to the air, because it's winter, I would pull the blanket up to cover her.
Our bedroom is yellow, like the inside of a paper lantern - sunlight through yellow curtains, on yellow walls, making us glow like peaceful things in the deep blue bed. I was never comfortable sleeping beside anyone else, but she could be lying on top of me, her hair in my face, and I wouldn't care because she feels like a part of me. I know she's a separate person, and sometimes I remember it, when she looks luminous, laughing at thoughts I can't hear, but the rest of the time she is like a part of me. When she cries, I wonder why I am sad.
Having met her, I have a new feeling in my life - that there isn't anything permanent. I'm suddenly afraid of something happening to her, or me - and I have a sense of past lives spent with her, which reminds me that this life is going to end sometime, and if we didn't learn what we needed to learn, we will end up returning to this old yellow morning, returning to this crazy life, this crazy fucking world, over and over. Maybe we've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe for as long as there has been life, we've been circling through bodies and eras, sometimes finding each other, sometimes not.
She thinks that this time we won't need to come back, and when I look at her face in the morning while she's asleep, I can believe her, because I don't know what need there would be. I know I know her. I know myself, and I know this world, and I know her. Everything seems a thousand times more real, and everything seems like a dream: beautiful but unimportant, like crystal cloud patterns at sunset over the river in Dublin. Seagulls frozen into a smiling photograph, with just enough light to cast them into shadow. Looking at cramped apartments in old red brick houses, above the market arcade. I could have dreamed all of this, but I would never have been able to make her so beautiful.