Today, as black earth turns snow-white and crimson feeds the roots, rising again through dark hydrangeas - blue, pink, purple. I remember you dancing through snow in a summer dress, winter wearing everything it owned, while your bare skin melted the snow around you and your laughter made a fool of the cold. I thought, calmly and stupidly:

for the rest of my life,that is what I want to look at

An ocean tried to keep us apart and could not. Again and again, we arrived. I remember warm rains in Africa - and me, completely naked on a thousand-year-old grave hill, shouting at the dead because this seemed like a reasonable way to impress you. Maybe it worked; the cookies certainly did not! our first kiss tasted like strawberry and we laughed too hard in the wet grass, remaining seductive.

Once, a rainbow stood inside a thunderstorm - you the rainbow, me the thunderstorm - Or was it the other way around? and we looked up, then at each other, and took it personally. We swore we would see every tree in the world together, and because one life would not be enough, when it ended we would find each other in the next and keep walking - tree after tree, life after life - until together we had seen them all.  We always said we would have a cabin in the woods and a dog named Azazel. And maybe more?

In this life, we walked the aisle as queen and king, drank champagne on the beach, and ended in a biker bar, still dressed for the wedding. I stitched you into my skin and still wear the ink with pride; the necklace rests beside my carotid pulse, where every beat has to pass it.

Home gathered around us: curry on the stove, your clothes on me and mine on you, new and old albums sung with more conviction than accuracy, concert nights with old dreams suddenly loud, our art drying side by side, all the beautiful things you crafted for me, the solemn diplomacy of a nose boop; and me climbing into bed first to warm your half with my body so the cold would never reach you before I did. I was making weather for you. Only smaller, only ours.

We swam naked in the lake. You walked me through the neighborhood that raised you, and at every corner another age of you appeared. The child, the girl, all the versions I had arrived too late to meet, walking beside us anyway.

At night we crossed other worlds: war zones and space stations, nuclear wastelands and mythic forests, fighting dragons, monsters, zombies and, worst of all, people. Sometimes shoulder to shoulder, sometimes carrying each other to cover. You had my back. Back in this world, through sickness and sleepless nights, we carried each other too. When you could not sleep, I woke; your small hand disappeared inside mine, and somehow I was the one being held. By morning you were drooling on my shoulder, all trust and no dignity.

I knew the crease beside your mouth, your scent left in my clothes, the change in your voice one second before laughter, the sleeping weight of your bum against mine; we spoke aloud what no one else had heard - all our dreams and secret fantasies, all our fears and wounds - and found each other there, even in the darkest corners of our minds.

There are too many little legends for one night to hold. And then, with no ocean between us, you were beside me and I could not reach you. I reached harder, because effort had carried us across everything before, as if it could decide for both of us. I called that love. I know now how a hand becomes a grip while swearing it is only holding. I learned to open mine.

The hurt is true, and so is the joy. I will not bring our happiest days or the lifetimes we promised the forest to argue with the ending. That rainbow was never a contract. It was a rainbow inside a thunderstorm, astonishing and true; no one can travel backward and take the strawberry from our first kiss or the laughter from the grass.

I once mistook death for proof - the easier fantasy: one terrible moment instead of every morning after. But I stayed for mornings, washed my one plate, kept my rooms warm, breathed when breathing was all I could do, and learned to carry my own life. I can hold myself now. I still miss holding you. I keep calling all this remembering because remembering sounds finished.

But a new album starts and I turn to tell you; I make dinner and know which mouthful I would steal from your plate; I sleep, but never as deeply as I did with your bum tucked against mine, your breathing loose in the dark. My palm misses the soft give of your skin, and strawberry is still not only fruit: you tasted like strawberry down there, and my mouth still knows.

At every full moon, the magic returns: you dancing naked in the snow, moonlight kissing your skin. The ridiculous wolf in me lifts his face, unconvinced by astronomy, always chasing the same moon. Two years on, at the edge of sleep, when my mind has only one thought left,

it is still you.

Dounia - your name means world. Before I knew you, that was only a translation. Now the world has your face. I have learned it is not mine to keep. I have not learned to love it less. I keep your letters folded. In the glasses from our wedding, the hydrangeas have darkened - blue, pink and purple almost black. They ask nothing of spring, yet each brittle flower still holds the shape of having opened.

My hands are open now. Sometimes they move before I do,
toward the place yours used to be. I let them miss you there.

They do not close.

I do not remember loving you.

I love you.