I dreamt last night that you came to me in a warehouse of a home, of big open spaces and oversized hearths where the birds lived in with us and the trees grew from the floor within corrugated metal walls and rough-hewn oak tables. You came to me with three bracelets of bronze, gold, and silver stamped with messages, only one I recall. "3 yrs" it said, like a promise. "Three years," you said, with a beaming, and genuine smile in your face. By a grand hearth of stone wreathed in a garland of winter greens, lit by the glow of a large fire we cant feel, we stand. "Three years?" My heart swelling, relief flooding though I didn't understand. A face I haven't seen and a voice I haven't heard in longer than I care to think. "Three years we've been together." Your eyes soften and I still don't understand because we haven't been together, we've been apart exactly that long and my mind races as I search for something I've missed. The truth I land on is that I am with someone that isn't you and guilt shades my face. Not guilt for you, but shame that I am the world to someone else that I don't love as deeply as I feel you. Tears come in torrents and are made more painful for the love I've allowed recognition and release. I rush into your arms in equal parts fear and jubilance. The truth that I settle into your arms with, the truth in the familiarity and rightness of you and your name and your love, the truth that I surrender to is that it is you, it always has been you, and it always will be you. My heart tears in my chest and my throat shrivels, my breath is sand and my mouth hangs wide as I remember what I have to say to someone now behind my present. As ever, I weight the scales in my mind with what is good and what is bad, even as you whisper through my hair and into my brain "I've waited for this, I thought I could never come back" - words I practiced in my mirror at home, in my car, in my mind as I worked all the days I was not with you. The scales creak and groan and screech their protests, the one man against the other, and my heavy, tired, sluggish heart is turning to sludge, and somewhere in the hollow of my spirit that we call 'soul', a stirring is felt and my mind bends to the stir. I feel it. The calculations and the weights don't matter, the past and the present don't matter, and the feeling and the fear don't matter. My body slumps down into your arms and I say "I am yours at last. The truth against everything is...I can't be without you again". And as with each morning, I wake, short of breath and full of fear that turns to sadness as reality seeps sleepily into view, crushing my heart. drama.