Sometimes, I love you. Sometimes, when you're laying there, eyes closed and chest rising and falling with slow, measured breaths, you look innocent. You look sweet. You look as if you were crystal- pure and perfect, cold but easily warmed by my hands and my breath. I love that about you. The coolness.
I think it might be magical. The way you sleep. Like you're dead. Like you're a child. I love watching your hair fall in and around your face, silken and smooth as water when it flows through my hands. I only ever touch it when you sleep. I'm not brave enough otherwise. You're much too beautiful otherwise. Too lovely to possibly be human. I'm afraid of you waking. Afraid that you won't be real. Afraid that, should I touch you, you will disappear. Vanish as easily as if you were never there, fading into the air or the darkness. Or perhaps fading into the light.
Because you are good, aren't you? Good and wonderful. I know you are. I see it. I feel it. You're good and kind at your truest center. No matter how you act, it's there. It's always there.
I love to touch you. Never badly. Never in a way to harm you in any way at all. I just like to be gentle with your sleeping form. Caress your cheek. Trace the curve of your eye, your nose, your lips. You lips look ripe in the half-light. Dry and soft with sleep. I would kiss them, but you wouldn't like that, would you? I would never hurt your sleeping form. I would never do anything you wouldn't like.
It hurts, but I behave myself. Because I love you at these times. I long for your arms around me and mine around you. I want our hands to connect, a small hand enclosed safely inside a larger one. The power protecting the softness.
It makes my chest ache to think about these things. Does yours ache too, my slumbering love? Where your heart ought to have been? The hole there longing to be filled with warm, liquid blood, hot and oxygenated with emotion. Like mine wants to be. As ours always should have been. Always.
I kiss your sleeping forehead, the small meeting the large, inhaling your sweet breath when you sigh in your sleep. I stroke your so soft hair, letting my fingers twine and trail through, never pulling or catching. Always gentle. Always careful. Always loving.
Because at times like this… Just sometimes…
Sometimes I love you.