To say that I own him

is so wrong.

He just as much owns me.

We are bound to one another

by a mutual adoration so heart-shattering

that like all great love stories,

it will end in tragedy,

maybe for him,

but probably for me.

And the difference between us is that

I can foresee the day

when one of us will have to go on

without the other of us,

and he can only see that

every minute with me

is full of joy and contentment,

and every minute without me

is full of anxious longing.

And in the dark hours when I awaken

to find him sleeping soundly, with his head

pillowed on my hand,

I am certain that I, to him, am eternal,

and I drift back down and down

coveting his insensible peace.

It certainly felt like destiny.

Inseparable, junior high soulmates allied against

a confusing and chaotic and bullying world.

Grown-ass adults, pledged to others

but still living in a world of two.

Magical thinking,

protestations of foreverness,

all the signs we saw that proved beyond any question of doubt

that we'd been together for lives and lives.

Wallowing in the warm womb of knowing

that we weren't like the pitiable 'others'--

that our backs were got,

that someone would always be there

to take a bullet, if a bullet needed to be taken.

It certainly felt like destiny,

when intertwined lives became intertwined bodies.

And when friends said,

"What took so long?

The two of you have been in love forever"

and we knew, for sure,

that forever was truly forever.

Over and over we'd argue the morbid question of

who had to die first,

who had to go on,

which of us COULD go on, and for how long

because forever was irrefutably and empirically forever

Our lives circling the axis of each other.

Fairy-tale crazy, but, Lord have mercy,

both of us still so rabidly certain

that we were we, and they were they,

and forever was forever.

I'll spare the pedestrian details

about the girl,

the baby,

the unrecognized, unending betrayal

the irresistable force overcoming the immovable object.

The mind movies play day and night,

but the screen in my mind is the only screen

that needs to show

how a lifetime lived in self-told lies

(about fate, about constancy, about true love and trust and fairy tales and magic)

looks in the replay

flickering in the cold light of retrospection.

I'll not recount

the regret,

the tears,

the supplication,

the remorse,

the contrition,

the sad, broken endeavours made

to set the world back on its twisted axis.

It's all just too predictable, too sordid,

too fruitless.

It will have to be enough to say

that some twists of fate

just leave us twisted.

Some turns of fortune

turn our lives from the path we've mapped

and set us trudging, alone

through an unexplored wilderness

full of unknown trackways and imagined terrors.

An identity in pieces might be mended,

but the self that emerges from the shattering

can't help but be forever different.

And forever is forever.