I don’t think it gets easier. I don’t think distances seem shorter with time, or that time frets less over the miles. The further you get the harder I fall. The one thing that does change is the sound. Everything is softer, and quieter. Maybe love breaks the sound barrier. Maybe love flies so low beneath the radar that it isn’t even recognised. Maybe, in some ways love becomes a stranger to love.

As the days pull us ever further apart like a stray thread of yarn from a sweater unraveling, I feel something go quieter and slow down. Is this what dying peacefully feels like, you think? I have read of how people simply slow down and then stop. How the body refuses food and doesn’t ask for water, and then how the eyes no longer ask for sunlight, and the heart speaks less and less. Nobody listens. It’s not important anymore. Within hours, our breath leave us too, and in some unusual fashion, it does not feel as if we are betrayed by that. Nor do we feel as if we have let ourselves down. It feels, I believe, simply, as though we have been tired too long and now want to rest in the most ultimate sense.

Inside me, you do not leave. Perhaps you can’t. Perhaps, inside me I have you by the throat; my teeth on your jugular, in a way that I could not imagine having you in real life. In real life where to even behold your gaze beyond the romantically acceptable three seconds feels like a crime. But inside me, you stay and are stayed by my heat and my hand upon your thigh. Inside me, you say it’s enough for me to blink to understand consent. “Inside you, love,” you say, “we don’t need to speak. I’m not speaking right now. I am just looking at you and you know me, don’t you? Don’t you know me, love, as you know blood is red?”

I blink.