I lie here, your long dark hair like ocean waves, slipping through my fingers. Your petite, but powerful body curled against me, fitting like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, perfectly congruous with my own form. Of course, that's how we always were, perfectly compatible, but worlds apart. And we never knew it, until now. Until now, we'd never made the journey to cross the unimaginable abyss between us. So long had we avoided the inevitable. So long…
I remember seeing you for the first time. I was only three, but I remember it because it was the first time I had ever seen beautiful. Beautiful was not something I had ever even considered; just a fairytale to be told as a bedtime story to comfort children. Though I had never experienced beautiful before, I knew that you were it. You were the first of Auntie's children, and she was so very proud. Not of you, but of herself, for bearing you, as though she had created the perfection you embodied, as though she had assembled every immaculate bone in your body, infused each silk-soft raven hair into your pale, perfectly shaped skull. You lie in your silk covered bassinet atop satin sheets and goose down pillows, in your little velvet nightgown, but I couldn't help thinking that even if you lay on a pile of dirt, wearing a sack, you still would have looked like a queen, ready to rule her subjects, though she had not yet opened her eyes to see them.
But then you did. Your eyelids raised slowly, as though in a ceremony that I new that I would never forget. I stood frozen in time, the only two people on the earth, you and I. Those eyes burned something inside of me, like an irreversible curse, to have to remember those eyes, see them every waking moment, drifting past my thoughts, and then in my dreams, speaking to me with their sparkle as they did then. Not words, just…beautiful. Eventually, I was dragged away, my mother scolding me for staring so impolitely, even though I tried to tell her that I hadn't been staring because I didn't like you, but because you mesmerized me, captivating me in…you.
Of course, at the time I couldn't find the words to say all that, and all I could tell her was that I didn't want to leave. She mumbled about my father coming home soon, and he wouldn't want us out, and that we'd better hurry home or he'd be angry. My heart sank at this. I knew what it meant when my father came home.