“Who am I?”

“You are beloved,” I say to him.

I suppose people consider romance to be the highest form of love. They don’t seem to realize there exists a love that transcends all others in a spectrum of its own. It encompasses everything, everything—an intertwining of souls in the deepest parts of ourselves. He found me there and knew: I am his and he is mine.

We will be in heaven together, we say, never to be parted.

“You are my heaven,” he tells me, “my everything. There’s no place I could possibly exist without you.”

And yet I am here, existing 1855 days without him.

Thinking of the last time I was here, talking to him about Nietzsche and stove knobs and Día de los Muertos and Cryptic Clockwork and friendship and family and strawberry cheese toast and chonky burnt cookies and reading Alias Grace and watching Supernatural.

How empty it feels this time.