Chapter One

I just loved him. There was no long list of perfections. He was no more of one thing than another. In fact, he was rather broken. And like all broken things, some pieces were large, some were small, and some would never fit back in the place from which they fell. To know him in the morning was quite different than to know him in the afternoon, and the evening often varied from the night.

But oh how I loved him. He was more than my soul mate. He was the stuff that souls are made of…the substance and the life. To love him was to become part of the definition itself. To hear his voice was like breathing the salty air after hours under the sea. To feel his embrace was to feel the sun beat down on the back of your neck on a cold, windy afternoon.

He was everything. He was the night…and the morning. To love or to be in love…it was all the same for us. One could not be distinctly marked from the other because true love only exists as a whole. One feels it in every second. True love is inescapable. It is a luxurious prison and finding it is like finding a treasure in the middle of a forest. The forest is lovely, organic, and mysterious. Sporadically one may find an exotic plant…a lovely flower…or a poisonous snake. But you walk the path anyway, despite the potential danger, and your investment multiplies the further into darkness you wander.

Some days he was only darkness. Some days he was the light that peeks through the trees and reflects off of the rocks in such a way as to make one believe in something much larger than she.

Oh how brilliant he could be. It was in his eyes and the way I could see myself in them in our most intimate moments. Yes, he was the stuff that souls are made of, and I believed in him even when I didn’t believe in souls at all.

And oh how I loved him. I loved to crawl into the spaces the separated one broken piece from the next and simply lie there. It was easy you see, for my hand was always the perfect fit, and for a moment he was whole again. There were moments that I felt like I could reach inside of him and hold his heart in the palm of my hand, wear it upon my sleeve, cover up the traces of impulse with the permanency of love. Oh, combien j’aimais son cœur. Perhaps I was a little broken as well. Can a thing be only a little broken?

Something must at some point exist in a sort of wholeness, one would think, in order to be broken. I am not sure that I was ever whole. I certainly existed in pieces however. But if he was the stuff that souls are made of, and if he was the very definition of love, then perhaps I was the brokenness. Not the pieces of the thing that is broken, but the word. Two syllables, seven letters, and more pieces than one can count.

When did I become this?

LJB