It was so quiet and peaceful that I could hear the love whispering in the air.  The mellow trees were clapping with their supple leaves, sitting upright in regal tallness, welcoming me to my dream from every direction.  Natured echoed a splendid track of sounds that immediately put my mind at ease.  For what I was about to see, whether in a future time or in a dreamy place, would require the most of me.

A wide, tall house of a color that may have been red sat in front of me, facing a friendly street.  It must have had many rooms, for I foresaw windows everywhere.  Another house of similar complexity stood on the South-East side, although I am not sure that I lived there too.  Out from the sliding door came rushing many little kids, smiling and playing, as happy as they could be.  “Be careful now,” said a familiar voice.  It was my sister Lorena, who was just stepping out with my sister Vicky and mom.  I turned right to look at the kids that were playing in the backyard of this beautiful home.  They were my nephews and nieces, now a bit older than the last time I saw them.
We walked towards a deck on the backyard and past a wooden brown bridge over a small creek.  The other side of the deck sat behind the second house, where I could see the back of both houses and the many trees that enclosed both of their backyards.  My body was tired, but my spirit regained its strength by seeing so many happy faces around me.  Then, a subtle wind brought tiny snowflakes upon us.

 “Look, what is that?” asked Mario, my nephew.
“It’s snow,” I told him.
“Nieve?” asked my niece Devi, looking surprised.
“Nieve!” yelled the others in excitement, as they looked at snow for the very first time.

Kevin, Roxana, Rocio and Camila all seemed very excited!  They were jumping, and dancing, and opening their mouths, sticking their tongues out, tasting and touching this unknown white substance that kept falling from the sky.  Next to them, Hendy and Brian, my oldest nephew and niece, just stood there trying to look cool, even though inside they were just as excited to see snow for the first time.  Then Leonel, my brother in law, came out of the house looking angry for some reason, and both he and Lorena went back inside.

As Vicky played with the children, Brian and Hendy smiled but still tried to stay cool.  At that moment, my mind wondered for a second into a scene inside of the house, where I sat on a couch by the stairs, talking to someone who I could not see.  Out of nowhere came a small child with a passionate smile, stealing my heart as he looked at me no longer than a second before walking upstairs.  His hair was curly, but I could not see his face.  I looked only into his eyes, bright and pure, reflective of a gigantic good heart.  Somehow, at that moment, I knew I must have found at some point a woman so great that she had erased loneliness from my mind.  I breathed in, and I was back at the deck, on the first snow fall of winter, surrounded by many happy kids.

A few minutes later, while standing on the small bridge, I felt my heart become heavier, and my breathing become deeper and slower.  I looked around as if enjoying the dancing snow and the singing trees.  I heard nature speaking to me.  Then mom held my hand, and helped me lay on the bridge.  Another lady of a blurry appearance stood next to her.  Vicky came rushing out of the house, but slowed down as she saw my pale face, covered with red stains.

“It’s okay,” said mom, as if whispering strength into me.
Meanwhile, the blurry figure of a woman seemed to want to grab my other hand, but when she touched me, all I could feel was the love in the air.  I gasped for that very same air.
“It’s okay,” mom said once again.
“But I’m not done yet -- I’m not ready yet.” I said, while crying with a deep sadness.  “I haven’t done enough yet.”
“Yes you have,” she explained.  “You have made so many people happy.”

Vicky agreed.  The tall oak trees with their infinite branches and multitude of falling leaves agreed.  The wind agreed. The snow and the clouds both agreed.  But I, laying on that bridge and looking at the end of things, was not so convinced.  So, the wind blew harder, whispering the sounds of the hearts of many people. It sounded happy. The snow suddenly carried with it the happy memories forever etched in the minds of hundreds of people, while the very light that still brightened this day started shining clarity and convinced me that I had, in fact, helped many people be happy.
“Haz hecho a tanta gente feliz,” she said again.

I believed her this time.  So I lied on this wooden bridge, slowly breathing nature into my dying lungs, but happier than I had ever been.  I had helped many people be happy, and thus, I was finally happy.  My mom and my sister didn’t seem sad at all.  They understood what has happening -- they understood I was happy.  They knew I was dying happy.  Suddenly, life seemed like nothing more than an ending allegory.  It seemed to have been a learning journey which I had completed successfully.  Joy, happiness and excitement were all present on my everlasting smile, slowly filled every organ of my body until the only thing left to overfill was my heart.  That’s when I saw their smiles.  I saw the sky, and the trees, and this blurry silhouette still standing next to me.  And right there, as happiness overfilled me, I started to fall asleep very slowly and very deeply.  The entire winter panorama, along with a couple of happy faces, started to vanish into a cloudy day.  Then, finally, I died -- I died happy.  I died as happy as I could ever be.

While looking for some camping supplies, I stepped into a thrift store hoping to find cheap camp cookingware.  This store was part of Good Will Industries, which is an organization that provides work and humanitarian aid for those in disadvantage through its hundreds of donation centers and thrift stores.  Most thrift stores I've been to tend to overprice their merchandise, but Good Will prices seemed extremely low and fair.  I found most of the camping supplies I needed for under $2 each, plus a few bonuses....

They had a brand new U-Dance game, which is a sort of Dance Dance Revolution that uses infrared motion sensors instead of a mat.  I found it for $15, whie the retail price online is $75!  The game turned out to be lots of fun and quite a workout.  My dance moves stink, so I kept getting "keep practicing" messages for a while. :)  I think at this point, I am more interested in a motivator to work out than anything else -- and it looks like I've found one at a low price!

Anyway, my total came down to less than $30, which is at least five times less than what I would have paid at a sporting goods store -- and that's including a U-Dance!  Not only that, but the cashier asked me if I was a student.  When I said yes and showed her my student ID, she gave me a 10% discount. How awesome is that!  So, I guess going to Good Will for camping goods was a good move.  I might just have to go back to check out their electronics. ;)

My mind tends to wonder across seemingly unrelated thoughts. I tend to daydream about scenes of my life that I've put in the back of my mind for later processing, or fantasies so fabulous that my attention is trapped within.  It's not that I want to loose focus, or stop paying attention, but that's not how others see it -- specially when I wake up from my daydreams verbalizing the last thing that happened in my fantasy.  And this, of course, sometimes gets me in trouble....

Julie and I were hanging out at her grandparents' pool.  She was wearing this jaw-dropping, eye-opening and cannot-help-but-stare-at swimm suite.  We were floating in the deep side of the pool, facing each other and chatting.  Well, she was doing most of the talking -- I was just starring at her lips, thinking how awesome it would be to kiss her.  O and that large pair of femininity only somewhat covered by her bathing suite, which kept on floating over the surface of the blue water, just kept on stealing my attention.  Meanwhile, she kept talking.  Her well-shaped body was in my mind while she kept sharing her thoughts about dancing.

"So, I love tango", exclaimed Julie with a bit of happiness in her voice.

"Yeah? How does the tango go again?" I asked, as I tried very hard to keep my eyes on her eyes as opposed to her lips.

"T-a-n-g-o," she said while giggleing.  "It's really easy.  You go, T----a----n-g-o, with two slow steps followed by three very fast steps."

"Oh, that sounds easy," I said while nodding as I pictured Julie's graceful self moving to the beat of a tango across the dance floor.  T----a----n-g-o, she continued in my head, grabbing my hand tight and pushing her body against mine very hard during the n-g-o part.  I wonder what the tango would be like in the water, I thought to myself.  Our nearly naked bodies could get very close during the fast-paced n-g-o steps.  I wonder if we could move that fast in the water.  We may have to try it in the shallow side of the pool, since we wouldn't be able to move fast enough underwater for the n-g-o part.  In fact, we wouldn't be able to move that well underwater, period.  Well, Julie probably could, but I couldn't since I am so clumsy.  Could I dance underwater?  Well, fish do it, don't they?  Kind of... trained fish maybe.  But fish aren't all that smart, at least not as smart as dolphins.  Dolphins can dance underwater.  And they make that weird high-pitch sound.... I wonder if they would sing a high-pitched teeeee---aeeeee----n-eeeee-g-eeeee-o-eeeee while dancing the tango underwater.  But dolphins aren't fish, they're mammals, so they don't count.  Underwater monster fish could probably dance a tango!  Except they wouldn't sing a girly high-pitched teeeee---aeeeee----n-eeeee-g-eeeee-o-eeeee tango like dolphins would.  They would sing a lower t-o----a-o----n-o-e-o-g-o tangooo.  It would go something like this:

"Shhhhh... Shhhhh... Shhhhh...." I started blowing on the surface of the water with my hands forming a loudspeaker over my mouth.  "Shhhh... Shhhh... Shhhh...."

"What the heck are you doing?!" Julie yelled with an awakening voice.  "Are you even paying attention to me?!" she yelled even louder.

"Huh?" I uttered, as I started to regain consciousness and process her irate words.

"What is wrong with you?!  What's that noise you're making?"

"O I'm listening, " I said, not yet knowing whether I was lying to her or telling the truth.  "I was just... uh... hmmmm..."

"What was I talking about?" she asked, probably testing me -- most likely testing me.

"Tango, of course! We're talking about tango!" I said with an apologetic tone while I blushed in shame.  "Come here, showed me how to do the tango," I added, hoping to get her mind off of this very uncomfortable moment.  I grabbed her hand and dragged her to the shallow end.

"What, here?" she asked.  "In the pool?"

"Yeah, why not."

"OK."

We started dancing the tango.  I starred into her eyes after every t----a----, when our bodies touched in the n-g-o.  "T----a----n-g-o," we sang as we moved through the water less gracefully than a couple of toddlers.  We laughed.  I was hoping she had forgotten by now my embarrassing daydreaming incident.  I think she had.  We kept dancing in the pool, laughing and holding hands tight.  Eventually, after a t----a----n-g-o in which our bodies rubbed closely enough to heat up the pool, we hugged.  We both smiled and starred into each other's eyes, as we hugged in the pool on that embarrassing day.

So here is the quick break down of my adventorous weekend:

Right after work, I drove to Livonia, Detroit, and then Windsor, where I met an interesting fellow.  I then drove back home to Grand Rapids.  The next day, I drove to Holland where I made a new little friend who is now addicted to microscopes, and then drove back to Grand Rapids.  A few hours later, I found out there was a Pow Wow in the Ann Arbor area, and I still had time to make it to the great walk which started at seven.  So, I drove to the Pow Wow in Saline, where I met a lady from an Ontario tribe who tought some Guatemalans who live in Toronto how to fish, and also a Shamal who told me a few sacred Hopi stories.  After the Pow Wow, I missed my exit to Lansing so I drove up to Flint, where in a split second I decided to go see the thumb of Michigan.

I drove to Lapeer and then Marlette, the heart of the thumb, and then to Bad Axe where I met some elite hackers.  I was lucky to find a hotel open late.  After spending the night in Bad Axe, I drove to the tip of the thumb, or two tips rather (if you look real close): Port Austin, where I took some pictures and wrote some nonsense; and Pointe aux Banques, where I hiked into a hidden bay to take pictures and write more nonsense.  On the way back through Bad Axe, I met Amanda, who now owes me a date.

On the way back, I stopped by Ionia and hung out with some friends.  Then I drove to Lowell, where I enjoyed some Taco Bell before they closed due to technical difficulties (geez, those dudes from Bad Axe really had nothing better to do...).  I walked in a park half-flooded by the Grand River, where I wrote more nonsense until it actually started to make sense.  Since I wasn't quite ready to go home, I went to Comstock Park and eventually found my way to Riverside Park.  There, my mind wondered for a couple of miles until it came to realize what my first book will be about.

I made it back home safe and sound, having visited so many different places and experienced the most random events of the year.  The people I met and the things that I saw all came together after hours on the road to show me what my book will be about: love.

I just sat there listening to the river.  I listened to the molecular flow in the turmoil of its waters, rocking in every direction and colliding with the dampened grasses of the park.  Only the ducks dared to break its majestic chaos, swimming in every direction that was opposite to the clashing sounds.  The river never stood still.  It kept forever moving with a diminishing grace, ever reflective in a wavy pattern of all that shines above.  That is when I saw it.  I noticed that the concave sky, which was always so distant and so far above, was hereby being pulled into the Grand River and dragged to the same altitude as my mortal life.  The heavens that had always been smooth and so perfect, the very same that were unreachable, untouchable and beyond sight, were now distorted, opaque and within my grasp.  The river kept flowing, resounding and reflective, showing me what was possible and what I could someday touch: the sky.

The river changed its patterns and reflected something new, as if it were trying to tell me, “This is why you could.”  Behold, a memory surfaced on the water in the form of my physics teacher’s words.  “You always come up with the most unorthodox solutions,” he said.  “Everyone here will stick to the book and come up with the same type of device, but you always come up with ways of doing things that I, in my many years as an engineer, would never even think about.”  I was never sure if that was a compliment or not, until they day when I was offered my first professional job.  Human resources needed to verify organizational hierarchies on the fly.  Two teams spend months creating software and reports that never worked with the same simplicity as mine.  My software, created in just a couple of days during the last month of my internship, was point-and-click and resembled a map.  This was unlike anything anyone had created, or even thought about.  It was a unique, even unorthodox, way of manipulating seemingly unrelated data and presenting it appealing to the user’s eyes.  “I am sorry that I didn’t learn sooner about how talented you are,” said my manager over the phone, referring to my software, as she offered me the job.  Then, like bubbling champagne, the memory splashed away into the waters as a new one surfaced.

Statistics was always my favorite type of math, not because it was useful but because of the complexity that it tried to explain.  It modeled pure chance and explained the impossibility of things.  Statistics showed me the way to quantum mechanics, or the impossibility of the very small, and cryptography, or the likelihood of hiding information with unmet strength.  So, when the time came to plan my capstone project, I had statistics in mind.  I was to improve upon or invent a device, a network or another technology and make it secure.  What no one ever told me was that this secure network had to be comprised of computers.  So here I came, with my unorthodox way of thinking, now inventing a secure communications network for robots while the rest of my class drowned in the unchallenging computer networks of the time.  I made three little robots and programmed them to talk to each other wirelessly.  One was a leader, one was a follower and the third was a vicious attacker.  I made the follower obey the commands of the leader in such a way that it could differentiate with statistical probability between commands originating from the leader and commands faked by the intruder.  Although the communication was encrypted, the follower was still able to detect the attacker and respond accordingly.  But just what could these toy robots do for my future, or for the future of humankind?  They could put me in a position to research medical nanobot networks, design rescue robots, or create intelligent space robots that talk securely through the vastness of space.  Yes, space, the very same space that the river reflected upon its face and had showed me was more reachable than ever before.  “This is why you could,” said the river to me in its watery voice; “because you are already closer than you realize.”

At that moment, out of the water surfaced the memories of two servers impregnated with my unmatched creativity and programming strength.  The first held three complex pieces of value-added software that I alone had developed or setup:  An asset management system that kept track of hardware and software in thousands of systems enterprise wide; a business intelligence suite that provided on-demand insight into IT procurement and license compliance; and a half-hacked, half-reverse-engineered and fully secured web application to update LED signs.  This server also gave life to complex business reports and data load and transformation tasks so extreme and complete that they soon become a source of truth.  The second server was rich in media and the latest of Web 2.0.  It hosted OakPages.com, an international online community designed for families and friends to keep in touch.  I created the system alone in less than a month, even its most intricate features like multi-user blogs, video mail, photo albums, dynamic family trees and tight privacy settings.  These servers, as the waters showed, together with their intriguing systems served to prove that sending robots into the infinitude of unexplored space was definitely within my grasp.

I sat there watching my memories surface one by one.  Some were good, and some were bad, but they all seemed to lead my mind into the same place each time: the sky.  The sky is where my future resides.  The river kept showing me reasons for creating, programming and securing robots that go into the limitless heavens.  The wavy reflection of the sky was now caused not by molecular strikes, but by the impeding distortion of human knowledge that I was about to bring about by exploring up high, so high among the evening stars.  Up there, that is where my dreams reside.  Up there in the concave sky, never again unreachable, are my robots to fly.  I just sat there listening to the clashing sounds of the water, while watching upon the river’s face the reflection of an ambitious future now within my reach.  The river kept forever flowing, while I kept moving closer and closer to the sky.

Some people do not believe in ghosts, but here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, ghosts are everywhere.  They can be seen frozen at gas stations, roaming the streets of downtown, dying over and over in the oldest neighborhoods, clanging from the city buses and even cooking refried dead animals in pricy restaurants.  Ghosts are everywhere in this city of the dead, and I have met one.  She suffers the same death day after day.  First, she is exploited for a minimum wage at T.G.I. Friday’s, where she burns her fingers without breaks for hours at a time while dipping shrimp in burning oil.  She is ensured to work only enough hours as to not receive benefits, even if that means kicking her out after a one-hour, on-call shift.  She is transparent to the managers, who cannot seem to notice the air moving as she walks among them.

Ghosts like her have died poor, so she doesn’t have a car.  Instead of driving home from work to rest in peace, she walks three miles in the snow at one in the morning, much later than the latest bus.  She comes home and eats her first meal of the day, but without chewing it, since the permanent smell of grease that forever stinks in her clothes has a way of fumigating flavors.  And there, at this shared home that steals over half of her paycheck, at this place sixty miles away from her own daughter, she rests.  Not peacefully, not gracefully, but agitated in worry.  She dies there.  She dies for five to six hours until the alarming sounds of the latest drug-related arrest right next door revives her so she can suffer in purgatory one more day.

This time, it is Sunday.  The Rapid buses only run every hour or two, so she must perform a desperate search for change in her room two hours earlier than usual to get to work.  She waits at the bus stop for twenty minutes, even in sub-arctic winds, just to ride a bus that takes her in the opposite direction of where she needs to go.  Maybe she only needed to wait five minutes, but a bus that carries only ghosts could care less about getting dead people on time to their graves. This is her punishment for working too hard.  The bus arrives at the central station, where she must wait half an hour for the next bus.  This one, which is also late, will drive her back to her side of town and will leave her half a mile from work.  She walks to work.  She burns her hands in boiling oil, receives her absolute minimum payment and walks home again because hey, it’s Sunday, so the buses stopped running at five.  She gets home almost empty handed since she was only allowed to work two hours today.  And now, now she wonders, she worries, about how ten dollars will feed her for a week and take her to see her daughter, who is sixty miles away.  So, she cries.  She cries herself to death.

It is on a Thursday night that she finds out she is pregnant.  But the father wants no ghostly child; the father wants no more [!] children of his own.  He wants to dump it while it is still an unborn kidney bean.  He wants to bury it in the past, assuring no one will ever know this little [!] ghost ever existed.  She refuses.  She refuses to give up the one thing that is now giving her life.  She refuses to give up what remains of her soul.  She would rather battle all the blood-thirsty daemons of this purgatory than to sink, without hope to reemerge, into the fires of Hell.  But Hell is closer than she thinks.  Her social worker, who has been charged with helping zombies succeed, has not gotten back to her in several months.  She must now hunt the streets in search of her social worker.  She must now roam the streets in bitter desperation, hoping to at least get a paper form that will assist her newly developed housing needs.

Two weeks later, and just a mere five weeks into her pregnancy, she finds herself at the verge of Hell.  Her tooth breaks.  She is in pain.  She is in an indescribable amount of pain.  However, she has to work the next morning so she cannot take care of it just yet.  She goes to work, and then calls the emergency services of Cherry Street Health Center.  But they can’t hear her.  They can’t hear her pain.  They can’t acknowledge her existence.  They are unwilling to listen to the whining sounds of a ghost.  She has to wait until Monday morning to get the help she needs.  She has to wait three days to rest in peace.  That night, she comes home and she cries -- no, not cries, screams -- and says she is in excruciating pain.  Excruciating, wow, now that’s a big word, she thinks.  But the truth is, excruciating is the only word that can accurately describe the suffering of her lost soul.  She takes only enough pain killers to prevent upsetting her baby, her kidney bean, but not enough to actually stop the pain.  She cries.  She cries in desperation.  She cries with excruciation.  But this time, she cannot cry herself to death.  She can only cry, and scream for compassion, and toss and turn, and feel the sharp pain killing her from tooth to brain.  And now she knows; she knows she is in Hell!  She must endure the agony of burning up and being shot on the face, over and over again, not only through this night, but through the next night, and the next, until the Westside Health Center opens on [!] Monday.

She is tired of crying.  She is tired of crying out for existence among the living dead.  However, her most pressing priority is to get this aching tooth taken out of her and her child.  She leaves home early, but her bus is once again late.  Her bus is running almost twenty minutes late.  She gets to the clinic before the sun even comes out, but she is three minutes too late.  She walks into the Westside Health Center, where her spiritual presence is just that: spiritual, ghostly and nonexistent.  The people there cannot see her face.  The people there cannot feel her pain.  The people there are less human and less alive than the ghosts like her.  She is three minutes too late, so she cannot be seen.  There is no one before her, and there is no one after her.  She is, in fact, the only patient there.  Yet, she cannot be seen, because she is three [!] minutes too late.  She is desperate.  She asks for a prescription for antibiotics, or at least pain killers, to help her through the day.  She asks only to remain in this world one more day, until she can come back the next morning to get the root of her misery pulled out.  But both she and her baby, both are denied; both are denied the right to exist.  Both are denied healthcare.  Both are booted out into the coldness of the morning and into the most dangerous street of this dead city.  To the clinic, she is dead.  She is a ghost.  She does not exist and has no right to exist.

The very next morning, she arrives twenty minutes early.  That is a whole five minutes before the doors even open.  She comes in, but the people there do not seem to notice the cold air that slips through the door.  They see no one and hear no voice.  She speaks -- albeit she screams inside -- for a third time now.  But it’s Tuesday.  They can only see one patient today, and even though she is the first one there, she may have to wait until five in the afternoon and may not even be seen at all.  In other words, she can wait there all day, but she will probably be seen right through, deserving only of a ghost.  To these people, she is dead.  She and her baby are ghosts.  They cannot see her.  They have denied her for the third time the very care they are funded to provide.  A charitable organization my [!]!  The moment they say no to a pregnant woman, they moment they say no to her and her unborn baby three times and boot them out into the streets, they are by definition not charitable anymore.  They are now less holy than a grave.  To them, this poor pregnant woman maybe just another ghost, but to those like her, she is a very real person, a very real person carrying a baby in her womb.  She is a very real pregnant woman who now stands in the street with an infection on her face and not a place to go.  She is a ghost.  She is a ghost among thousands of ghosts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the city of the living dead.

How do you tell someone that you like her? Do you take her out on a date, and wait until the perfect moment comes, when both of you are in tune and are feeling really comfortable with each other, and then just blurb it out? Or do you go out on a date to have fun, and tell her how much you care through kind gestures until eventually, when you are walking side by side, your hand bumps into hers and suddenly there is contact. Then, you grab her hand and if she doesn’t let go, you smile, you stop walking, turn face to face without letting go and say, I really like you? Or maybe you walk her to her car and as you are saying goodbye, you grab her arm and pull her aside. Then you say, wait, I like you; I mean I really like you?

But what would she say? Would she be left speechless and stare at you with a glazing smile, and then giggle and look away for a second when you are done declaring your love? Would she keep her hands tight and squeeze yours, while she anxiously utters with happiness and patiently waits for more? Would she be passionate and throw her arms around you, then tell you to shut up and kiss her, and cut you in mid-sentence with an electrifying kiss? Or would she reply, I know, I like you too, then give you a minute kiss and say you’ll talk more later? Or maybe she’ll kill you when you let your guard down with a dreaded phrase? That is really nice, but I’m sorry, I just don’t feel the same way about you. You’re a really nice guy, but I only want to be friends. Can we be just friends? And of course, you’ll agree in both shame and defeat, assure her you can be friends, and ask her to forget you said anything. But inside, o inside you will burn in shame, and inside you will die that day knowing that you will never be friends. Then, you will walk away and you will find every excuse not to see her again. Of course, she will do the same.

I wish I could see you tonight, just before closing my eyes, as we kissed goodnight.  My arms would wrap you tight, while your legs would interlock mine.  We would cuddle against each other with a subtle passion that would spark bodily friction throughout the night.  My lips, at first resting over your cheek, would slowly find their way to your upper lip.  There, I would kiss you delicately as if touching fragile art.  I would then smell the nightly scent of your sleepy skin, akin to sweetened condensed milk.  My nose would slowly start to embrace yours, as your body pressed its feminine duplicity against my chest.  Your hands would slowly massage my back, while mine do the same for you, except farther down and further back.  Then, your legs and mine would play a game of chess in which we are always looking to bring each other down.

As I moved on to kissing your bottom lip, I would feel the slippery softness of your playful tongue.  It would start by touching my upper lip, and almost magically make its way to my own wet tongue, and back into your mouth, and forth into mine again, and back and forth, and forth and back.  And then, as we greeted each other’s mouths, I would roll over on top of you, while you made an orgasmic sound.  And you would make it again, many times throughout the night, until the sweat and the tiredness would take us wholly.  Back to cuddling, with me still inside you, we would fall asleep in each other’s arms, to the whispering sounds of a happy night.

What is her name, you ask?  Her name is Beauty.  Her name is Heaven.  Her name is Charm.  Her name is Sincerity, and Fun, and Courage, and all that is good and right.  Her name is a melody.  It is a sound that calms and excites, all at the same time.  Her name whispers into my ears a warm, soothing breeze that blows away all the pain in life.  At the same time, her name has a certain resonance that hits my chest like a wave of sounds, resounding and majestic thunder sounds.

Her name has a way of slipping through the ether at night and making it to my ears, and into my head.  It flows into my dreams and suddenly, all I can hear is her, all I can see is her, and all I can dream about is her.  I wake up confused to the sound of her name, not knowing whether up is down or down is up, whether the air is in or out of my lungs, and whether my eyes are open or still shut.  I lie there thinking -- no, not thinking, wishing -- that she is next to me, that I have awaken in bed next to more than just her name.

How do I feel around her?  Well, she has a way of making things right.  I can come in rage, in sadness, confused and without sight, and she will just sit there and listen, then assure me that everything will be fine.  She will make me believe it without question, as if her authority were supreme.  Her words clear all worries from my mind.  Alternatively, I can come to her happy, and excited, and exploding with pride.  She will just sit there and listen, then be as happy as I am.

She also has this way of reducing my age.  When I am around her, I feel like I am playing a game, a little kid’s game.  I enjoy every second of it, and do not seem to mind the time that elapses as it gets dark.  I almost feel like telling her, “Awwww, please don’t go! Stay a bit longer! Let’s play some more!”  That is when I realize that I am a kid again, and she, so innocent and fun, is like another kid that could spend the day playing with me.  I do not want her to leave.  I do not want this feeling to end.

Why do I not tell her how I feel and see what happens?  Because the worst that could happen is the worst that could happen: she could say no.  I do not enjoy waking up every morning thinking that she is lying next to me, just to open my eyes and swallow the bitter emptiness of my bed.  I do not get aroused seven to eight hundred times a day while thinking of her just so that later I can feel miserable because she is probably miles away.  I do not get a kick out of sitting, and standing, and jumping, and walking, and hitting the wall, and scratching my skull, and sitting and doing it all over again because I cannot for the love of God, I cannot get her out of my freaking head!  I do not love feeling stupid, or anxious, or speechless or noticeably excited when she suddenly pops up from behind just to say hi, or texts me in instant messenger saying, “Morning sunshine.”  Ugh, and I must certainly do not like the constant pressure, the daily affliction, the excruciating ticking seconds that must go by while keeping myself from bothering her too much as to avoid annoying her.

So, the worst, the absolute most catastrophic, most distressful wretchedness, the biggest torturing misfortune that could ever happen to me is for her to say no.  I am not ready, nor in a million years will I ever be ready, to take that risk.  If she said no, it would mean that the morning bitterness, the embarrassing daily erectile miseries, the nuthouse self-inflicting desperation would all have been, well, stupid.  If she said yes, all those things would still be pretty stupid, but who cares?!  If she said yes, nothing else would matter!  However, I do not know how she feels, therefore I must assume that the most probable outcome is a century-long torture brought upon a second-long “no” that would stretch my heart miles apart just to fit more pointy needles per square inch on it.  I much rather keep quiet than endure such a thing!

It is what it is, and what it is, is everything beneath the soft sheets that cover this atmospheric body.  It starts up high in the vaporized waters, where the cosmos pauses as it passes through a heavy magnetic field.  Just as it clashes with the highly energized building blocks of the universe, it sustains and retains underneath what little heat the distant yet closest star has provided in half a full spin.  Just below the flying waters and clangs from the cosmos, a more subtle gaseous layer inspires its creatures to see what's far above from up close, and what's close below from a distance.

It is what it is, and what it is, continues to be what it has set out to become.  It started small and then grew, as the solar revolutions elapsed over and over again, into gigantic tectonics that together have formed this blue morphing sphere.  A great distance divides the peaks of its highest landmarks and the bottom floors that lie and sink beneath the weight of its oceans.  Within and around, above and below, life spawns and is taken as the creatures that in it live build and destroy complete civilizations.  It withstands attacks to its nuclei, and punishes the violators of its rights with a fierce force that consumes accelerated with heat, or that brushes away all those that are smaller than it.

So what is it?  It is what it is, and what it is, is all the moves and all that sits very still underneath this cosmic shield, and above the animated magma tha flows freely through ferrous catheters.