While you sleep

All I can do. I shall sit here, barely moving, barely breathing, holding your right hand gently between my cool palms, feeling the delicate lines of skin that form above and below the joints of each of your fingers.

It’s true that I am impatient, always impatient, and that such impatience makes me reckless, bothersome and ever so slightly obsessive. Yet, deep within this mere frame of skin, I have been storing up precious emergency reserves of the willpower that you so often find a source of riotous humour because of how frequently it fails me. The joke (such as it is) is on you now, my dearest, because I can find the strength to wait for as long as it takes, believe me. From somewhere. Somehow.

Flickering, watching the flickering. I have become a silent movie. Don’t draw back the red curtains. I don’t need the clearest of views to be able to tell, from my hidden vantage point just below the soothing rays of illuminated dust particles, exactly what is required of me.

All I can be. I shall whisper a solitary word to myself under the near-rhythmic patterns of life unravelling just outside my grasp - not the word you’re thinking of either, not the one I whispered to you in the seconds before your eyes fluttered to a close - as I watch the sun rise, the clouds drift and the moon fall through the gaps in my consciousness. I can see your leaves moving even in the slightest of warming breezes. I’ll water the plants while you’re not here. Yes, it’s a small and pointless gesture, but life must go on in all its varied forms, I suppose.

More flickering. Hush. Hush, I’m watching. Second reel, the sound of magnetic tape. The faintest electrical glow dances back and forth across my face. I’m not sure what the time is any more.

All I can say. Don’t go down. Stay wrapped inside this shining light, won’t you? I am here forever, and not just because I have nowhere else I would rather be in this precise moment. Nor in the plentiful future moments that wait in an orderly queue beyond the plain, unassuming door at the foot of your narrow stairway. I won’t reveal all my reasons right now, because you need to rest. Dream. Be. For a night and a day and then some.

All I can’t do, all I can’t be, all I can’t say. That’s the true meaning of the only protection I can offer until the sun comes up for a new day.