My teeth are cemented together but the breeze slides through them like a man’s fingers through his lover’s hair, begging to know her as only long-distance lovers can. The wind traces a cool finger across my skin, kissing my jumping jugular with lips that are thousands of miles away, creating in me a longing that I hadn’t known existed. Iron-clad vibrations drifting in from four sides only remind me of airplanes, and of all the places I want to go, and then of you. You as you pull me in so tightly that my breath runs and hides, chasing itself down railroad tracks that somehow pass for a spine. You as you laugh with me (such a free sound, like a song I had once known by heart but had quite forgotten until now), our backs to the frozen ground and our faces open to the sky. You: so unlike anything I have encountered in my trek through decades, yet familiar as a childhood memory glimmering behind my consciousness. It has always been the deep blue oceans that held me in place as time lapped at my shores, corroding me into someone else entirely. Who would have thought, or even guessed, that the patterns we create so independently and so full of self-purpose and preservation, were never quite so independent at all?