We think we tell stories, but stories tell us. We guide its flow, but this time I am drowned – submerged in skin, water, movement. Floating moments, intangible exchanges brought to the surface, presiding for a while, droplets to be gathered. Our closeness of skin and flesh reveal a story, a story I tell myself about who we are together. A fierce soothing clarity, a base from which all else is built.

Memory is a shifting, fading, partial thing, an embrace that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist. I am more and more aware of the things I have forgotten. They prick me in unexpected places. In my fingertips, as I reach for something I have already forgotten. Our memories do not escape, but their links and pathways erode over time, no longer able to see things that our own eyes have witnessed. As I consciously try to remember the past, I am erasing it. Creating alternate channels to moments which may not have ever happened. All we have left is the past we choose to create, consciously or unconsciously.

This tenderness is what is real to me now. It is my truth. There are other stories, not yet ripe, that I will see and tell in later years. But for now, this is real.

The whirlwind in which we flow is serene, for a moment, almost still.