I have a story you never asked me to tell. It’s taken place on a single continent and spanned the course of a year, and maybe it’s not a tale you’d want tonight … but on the off-chance it is, I’ll begin:

Once upon a time, there was a girl, and there was a boy, and they lived far far away from each other. But despite that geographical fact they managed to chance upon each others’ existence, and were mutually attracted and intrigued and fascinated, and so it was they struck up a correspondence. Although they were connected in that they resided upon a single land mass, they were separated by the fact they resided in separate kingdoms and also, distance, and could not readily cling to one another as they perhaps would have otherwise. And so they talked.

As they talked, they discovered they had more and more in common with each other. They discovered, perhaps, that they were connected, somehow. They were both creators of art, of word and song, yet scarce could find thought to quite adequately reflect the other. Each other. The muse of every thought. She thought she caught the Truth within his eyes; a soft light she nevertheless wanted to hold. He thought he’d captured Life within her laughter; ripe radiance he intended to keep.

The difficulty came in how to separate their essences from the instances of each they sought to grasp. They held tight to their pieces, to their own and to those, eventually realizing they’d grasped the wrong things too tightly.

Whilst I concentrated on holding yours, I let loose of mine. Whilst you concentrated on holding mine, you let loose of yours. And now it seems as it should be, rightly. We hold each other as tightly as stolen, but as loosely as knowing.