“Be careful,” he told me.
“Why?” I asked. Sometimes goodbye looms larger when it hasn’t been said.
“Many men will love you. But few will have the strength to honor you.” His dark eyes glowed–warm, dizzying, kind. I ached for home.
“This is a hard thing for a man to have to admit to himself,” he said.
Under the glow of the streetlight, the gentle breathing of the ocean behind us, we memorized every line, shadow and curve. The secret heartbeat.
He kissed me softly on the cheek, with feeling, with apology, our bodies the closest they had ever been.
And with that, the night swallowed us, swallowed our story. By morning break, we would each find ourselves drifting alone once again on an ocean of distant ships, nothing real except all that exists above, all that keeps us afloat below, and a belief that at the end of the horizon, will be someone who finds within us the answer to their own personal myth.