You dozed off next to me last evening, and I gazed with wonder at a face so often marked by the weight of twenty years of sadness and abuse - a face that, in that moment, held a slight smile resting beneath fluttering whisps of pastel-brown eyelashes curling up toward frosted windows hidden by blinds drawn close to shut out the eyes of a world that, in that moment, was not mine, because my world was there in that quiet room, amongst the continuous hum of a radiator and the rise and fall of a fragile chest I promised to protect.