transitionally yours

I imagined her a place.

She was a precocious child and an indecent tease, but her laughter made me smile.

The sanctuary I built for her had paper walls; on them I wrote her letters, but the rain made the words transparent, kissing the ink into rivers of black.

I never left her alone; there were cats that prowled the garden and tempted the stairs to the marble where she slept. They would nibble on her toes while she slumbered and she would dream of oceans and brightly colored fish.

I fed her plump fruits that tasted of bittersweet sunlight and sorrow. She drank from a cistern of clay and bathed in the cask of oak.

When she wept, I made it thunder and she would huddle under garments made in sunset hues, her sadness forgotten.

She kissed me once, but she thought I was part of the dream, or part of the storm, or a memory, or a ghost.