I wish I could skip across time like a stone over water, skimming across the surface until I settled gracefully into the future, into a distant tomorrow where I’ve forgotten what it felt like to lose you.

I wish I could close my eyes and dream until this sadness has run its course through my body, like a disease, like a breaking fever.  I wish I could wake up one morning drenched in the sweat of a fading sickness, knowing the worst was over and that I would soon feel okay again. Every time I lay my head down, I hope to wake up feeling okay again.

I wish I could sink below the surface of time and swim through yesterday like a clear, still pool. I would float into the past, to the place where you told me “I could never be with her. I want you.” I would tread water there, lazily, believing every word, drinking in the feeling of being yours, of being your only. I would not come to the surface until my chest caved in and my body grew weak, until the line between living and dead blurred like ink clouding a full glass. Maybe not even then – maybe there, in the slow stillness of the past, I could close my eyes and allow myself to sink, to lie quietly in the happiest place I've ever been, in the place where you told me “You are the only one I love” and I believed you. I could have died then.

I will stay afloat until calmer currents come. I can see stillness somewhere on the horizon, brewing and boiling like the catharsis of cracking thunder just beyond tomorrow, just there, out at sea. Please let it come soon.