Wherever I go, I take you with me.

I heard a story about love once. It was more of an anecdote, really, a statement filled with rhetoric. You throw me against walls every night of my life, sometime more warlike than usual, but sometimes there is a trace of some sort of devotion; something more than simple repetative violence. Sometimes, I think the you in my brain still loves me.

The setting is usually blase. A car, sometimes a dry barren field. Tonight, we are in a boat about to be shipwrecked at the stern of her justifications. I see her, a mermaid carved into the ship's woodwork so that she, too, is instrumental in this. She, too, is in the body of the schooner, holding it together, holding us afloat.

I scream something about how this isn't the right time for this to happen, as if I have some sort of control over when you interject into my dreams. You laugh dryly, unamused really, and say that timing is everything. It is, it really is.

So I walk around the starboard side of the ship, looking for a vector for escape back to something else. A porthole that might really be a wormhole.

Eventually you get tired, or bored, and come to find me. You have an anchor tattooed to your arm. I don't think it's fitting on you, but feel impolite staring, so I tell you I like it. You know I'm lying, and that's where you snap.

As you reach for my paralyzed body, something else switches on in you. A glimmer in the corner of your mouth, and as your hands grip my arms and you shake me, banging my head against the ship's bow, I see a sadness growing. It hesitates in that space, but it is there. The mermaid of my heart begins to sing a soft lilting lullaby, and tears well up in your eyes. You drop me, look away. This is what haunts me when I wake, the possibility that you've hurt yourself more than you've damaged me.

As the ship disappears from around me, you fade away too, and I suddenly am inside of a tent, and it is warm and glowing outside, and I wonder if the fires have begun. S is with me, he is asleep inside a warm sleeping bag, and seems unbothered by the fires. I snuggle in closer to him and whisper, "fire can't destroy this. We are more than the sum of our carbons."

As the dream fades, I know this to be true. We are more than the sum of our carbons.

--runt