There are so many things I have never told you, words I have held behind my teeth until even my silence has begun to taste of you. I thought I knew what love was. Forgive me the weary confession; I know how often it has been spoken. Yet I had only ever learned to live with something missing. Then you came, and I understood why nothing had ever felt like enough. I have tried to quiet this. God, how I have tried. I have gone whole days refusing to speak your name, only to find it waiting on my lips in the unguarded hours of sleep. You are my weakness. The slightest tenderness from you undoes what years of solitude have taught me to endure. I can hold myself together through almost anything, then you ask if I am all right, and I ache to tell you everything. How do I explain what you have always been to me? Some nights I imagine you close enough to feel the answer: my hand trembling at your waist, my lips lingering beside yours, all those unsaid things caught in the breath before a kiss. I would tell you slowly. I would tell you until the composure left my voice, until you heard how much of me I have been keeping from you. And if you asked what frightened me so deeply, I would take your hand and lay it against my chest. Here. This is where I keep you. This is where every vow to love you less has come to die.