This screen, bright with frustration, draws-
with careful precision-
the shape of your face.
It must grow tired, as I do,
of creating this image.
How can I know that you are real
when I have never touched your face?
Bitterness for a system long corrupt grows within me.
I am full to bursting with love and fury.

These complications breed more dissatisfaction.
Afraid of travel, afraid of people.
Stuck in a seemingly unending loop of legality
for crimes forgiven long ago.
How many moons more must I wait
to hold your hand in mine?
Eight years.

Long, empty time laughs cruelly at our labors
as we struggle to hold together a friendship
(now a bloomed and wilting relationship)
that we once held above all else.
My love for you is unending, a thing of faerie tale,
but I find my patience lacking.
I have waited and I have yearned for you.
I have tried, to no avail, to leave you behind me-
instead, I was greeted with the haunting realization that
nothing compares to you.
No man, no woman, no circle of peers,
can provide for me the things you offer.
I know you feel the same,
though a mix of dread and delusion prevent you from showing me
in the way I need so desperately to be shown.
I know that you, too, feel this pain.

Seamless, ceaseless pixels bring me your countenance,
now weathered with sadness and age.
Once upon a time, I thanked them.
Now, I throw curse upon curse;
hurling all my animosity at those things that carry you to me
in the only form I've ever known.
"I've been living so long with my pictures of you that
I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel."

If I cannot feel your hand, cold in mine-
If I can't smell your hair
or feel your chest drenched with those happy tears of
At Last!,
do you really exist at all?
Mercilessly, cruelly, are we brought before our judge,
The Test of Time.
Eight years; is it wasted?