I am afraid.

I am afraid, each night, that when I wake up the next morning, you
will have gone.

I have often, every night for the past week, woken up in the middle
of the starry night, walking out into the garden, staring up at the
blinking lights in dread.

Who is to say what the Almighty sees fit?  I have already cheated
the very forces of Nature by keeping you by my side.

And who am I to challenge the One, if you had indeed gone?  I would
probably shake my head and bear the loss (the unbelievable loss) as
I would any unregrettable mistake.

Why? I ask the stars.  Why me?

I would invariably walk the corridors of the old temple, and end up
next your sleeping form.

There are no words to convey the beauty of a sleeping goddess.  The
sight is so illuminated, that I would be hard to mistake cloth for
ethereal flesh.

It was the first night in the temple, the first night of my life,
when I saw you sleep.  You were in the throes of a fever (odd, for
a goddess to have illness), and your body (yes, your body, new and
mortal) was helpless.  I knew loss, had known the unmistakable
dread of a universe collapsing upon a weak column in its structure,
known that I had no option but to die so that you would live.

Was it then that I had loved you?  No... that would be easy and
false.  You were but a seed then, a kernel of identity within the
vastness of divinity.

I had been possessive, terribly possessive, for a while.  When I
knew that you could not leave, could not, by Heaven (yes, Heaven
could and would force itself between us), be forced to part, I
felt the need to own you, to have you solely for my own.

I would jealously watch as you would talk to the trees, to the
pigeons that would occasionally visit, to the very air, and I 
would even think that the air was caressing you, holding you in
its tendrils, its winds and breezes, that the ground, my God, the
ground would hold your feet -

But it did not.  You floated, albeit marginally, above the floor
in the temple, as you would glide behind me.  And not even the
air was allowed to touch you - your divine aura brushed away all
flecks and particles.

How could I breathe on your neck, then?  How could I know the
scent of your soul?

It was as though I had been tuned into the fabric of the universe
into your frequency.

I had all the right in the world to be possessive of you - and yet
I could not possess you, own you.  You would lose your freedom
(your freedom! when did you find it?) and you would just become a
goddess, an icon.  And that I could lose you at any point.

It was then I knew I loved you.

I had learned to appreciated the God-fear.  It was our precious
time together, now, that mattered.  It did not matter that I may
not have learned to make love to you - it mattered that I was
learning at each step, at each moment to understand what it was
about you that in love with me and that was in love with.

You smiled in your sleep, and I could not bear to close my eyes.
They soon watered, and I did not blink, tears washing down my
cheeks as the wind shook me, asking me not to cry my wonder, not
to sob through my happiness, but I would not hold you - you who

is of the foam - for the you I love is not physical, can never
be touched by my hands or my lips, cannot be placed in a box of
words and desriptions, but is as plain as the stream of tears on
my cheeks.  Our love is this pain that resides in my chest,
wracked by the hand of God and my own mortality - it is this 
night that permeates and surrounds us.

I... I am called to love you.  Our child is within you, and is
you yourself, the growing being of this world and the other.  And
I am shaking, knowing that I can only begin to understand, cannot
hope to fulfill this destiny.  But our love is immortal, will
revive our mortal shells and will last eternally.

And all of these will remain on my wordless tears, the shaking of
my body, the darkness of the night, and will disappear by the hour,
by the minute, by the day.

Feebly, I walk back to my futon, and wait for dawn.

*****

This is partly in apology with the trend I seemed to enjoy in 
writing Oh My Goddess! fanfiction, with "in Chains" and "Rewriting
Mythology", and is more similar to "After All".  There is much mush 
to write.

Switch

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