Graceful slithering limbs caress the skin across my back. Pulsing and pulsating, its warmth lingers beyond dusk. I lay awake sleepless, cherishing every moment of a memory fast sublimating. Lucid with an expiration date.

His breath on the back of my neck was intoxicating like the first puff of that nicotine curse. Addictive and prying on my impulsive nature, one I have successfully subjugated before his arrival. Then I failed, and what a sweet sweet failure it was. Him, me, and that soiled blanket we borrowed. Beneath a ceiling of cosmic lights undulating for our amusement, across the alpine lakes with their sweet and salty breeze. I take a deep breath, a lungful further until I almost faint.

It was the sunrise that woke us. Blindly in its comforting heat, that enlivens our shared souls. We clasp hands in that endless moment when the whole world meant nothing, and we were the whole world. Complete and uncorrupted and consumed. The leaves crisply break beneath our entwined bodies, desperate to remain in that perfect embrace.

Yet I remember. That memory that remains unwritten, waiting for the day that it too will find my experience. When memory becomes reality, and reality becomes recollections.

It was morning. And I had to awake.