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I lean back and read what I have written.

The account is brutal, but brutality is sometimes the only way to kill a lie. Charm imagined tenderness, shared pleasure, and an intimacy belonging to us transferred into another woman’s hands.

She deserves to know how little of me entered that room.

She also deserves to know Temple came out of it mattering.

I turn to a clean page.

I will speak to you in whatever capacity you need.

Letters. A five-minute call. Silence with both of us breathing into the phone until one of us becomes brave enough to say something. I don’t care how we begin.

I miss your voice.

I miss your shitty dialect, your laugh, and the way you say my name when you are irritated but trying to pretend you aren’t. I miss the small sound you make when a book reaches inside you and the louder one when you realize you have won an argument.

I miss a million things about you.

I will wait until you tell me you are ready. That is when a different kind of work begins because paper has allowed us to control the pace. A voice doesn’t give us days to decide what the other person meant.

I am still willing to hear yours.

Now we need to discuss the future you described.

You told me a large wedding might never be safe for you. That sentence felt like an apology for failing to give me something I have never wanted.

The elaborate wedding would have been for you.

I would marry you at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas while a bored employee wearing an Elvis costume mispronounced both our names. I would marry you inside a courthouse, in our kitchen, or standing in the parking lot outside The Furnace if that was where you felt safe enough to mean the vows.

I need my boys and a few people we have chosen as family.

I need you.

Everything else is decoration.

Victorian poets wrote about love as though its greatness depended upon suffering, distance, and death. They made devotion beautiful by forcing it to survive impossible conditions.

I think they were wrong about one thing.

Love doesn’t become greater because it hurts.

It becomes greater when two people understand what the other can carry and refuse to demand more simply because tradition calls the weight romantic.

I would never ask you to endanger your health so hundreds of people could watch us promise each other a life. I would choose the life.

If we were ever blessed with children, you wouldn’t face one second of that alone.

Pregnancy would require planning, doctors, therapy, patience, and whatever else helped you remain safe inside a changing body. I would attend every appointment you allowed me to enter. I would learn what to watch without turning watching into control. I would listen when you told me something was wrong and trust the professionals around you without pretending love made me more qualified than they were.

Whatever hormones or weight gain did to your perception, I would fight like a pissed-off badger to bring you back to me.

If necessary, I would fuck you in every mirror inside our house until you remembered your reflection wasn’t the only truth available to you.

I stare at the sentence.

It is vulgar, possessive, and far too close to a promise.