I'm not sure when it happened
It couldn't have been that first magical day
When the air breathed with the life that can only come right before winter
And we laughed and ran
Surely it wasn't the next day, the apple perfect in its imperfection you handed me
A fruit changing hands and a quick grin before you walked away
Was it seeing you every morning, seeing you sleepy, beaten, bright, excited? Snapshots of a life that I couldn't help but love?
Or that long day
Spent in a bookstore
Silence; not comfortable; but sweet, thick with the scent of stories
You handed me books with that same fleeting smile
That accompanied the first Apple
By the time we drifted through the town wild in its abandonment, accepted fruit from the late summer, quiet in the shouting of two souls
Bathed in a dusty silence
Sweet with the scent of grain
And metal
It was there
The emptiness grew
Every time you left
But I didn't notice
Later, sheltered in the sounds of a kitchen, we transformed the excess of apples won from the autumn evening into warmth and sweetness of pie, sweetness your mouth held long after the last cooling bite
Sweetness I tasted
When your lips found mine in a safe but dangerous darkness
Drowsy with the warmth of a full day
My fingers still found that place
Cupped between your neck and your chin
As your fingers drifted and lit,
Spelling secrets across my shoulder blades
But morning came, as it is want to do
And the monster in my chest made itself known
Collapsing the newly opened warm space in my chest
Now, every day without you is winter
The completion you give
Less tangible than the ghosts of leaves on the black trees of now
But a sunrise comes with every night
That sudden improbable bloom of light
Illuminating everything inside me in the glow
Of you
