If I could go back in time

If I could hold her close and kiss her, I would do it so hard, and so fast, and so fully, she wouldn't know what hit her.

I would wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tightly, and I would hold on for too long - far too long.

In the best part of myself, I imagine love as a shimmering, sunset-colored, melted metal. I can pool it in my hands and throw it into the air, and it splashes all over the object of my affection. It isn't too warm or too cool, it's perfect, and it tastes like cane sugar.

Sometimes, love and it's remarkable essence can be a moving, aurora type of vision. Gently dancing on the horizon, no matter where I direct my gaze. It's like the Mona Lisa, it follows you wherever you go, and it makes you happy, although you couldn't exactly articulate why.

I would tell her to hold on tight. Prepare to scream, full lung, full voice, full from the belly - scream and be heard, don't be frail, don't be invisible, don't be without your voice and your breathe. Say what you need to say.

The people who love her will be paralyzed with fear. It will enrage her. It will also break her heart because she will see, in their inability, just how much they love her. But I would tell her that she should not let their fear silence her, because she will be the one who will live, day-in-day-out with the consequences of her choices. Or lack thereof.

She will be the one who will wake up with peices missing. She will be the one who will not understand why her spine can't catch up with her brain.

I would tell her to try to hold onto her own vision of love, no matter how ethereal it will become. Because sometimes, it will be the only thing that makes sense anymore.

Love for the brutal, beautiful world that holds her captive, her feet never more than a few inches from the earth - her lungs never free from oxygen chains - her heart never free to stop moving.

When I woke up with part of my skull gone forever, it changed the animal part of me that I didn't even know was there. I woke up and I found myself walking on a tenuous wire, high above a vast and gorgeous and trecherous canyon. I've not found my way off of it yet.

But I learned something very important. I learned to recognize the love I have for the brutal and beautiful world. The brutal, beautiful world. A gift and a curse that I lived through it, to be left incomplete, but somehow enhanced.

I would tell her these things, and she wouldn't understand until after it happened, and then she would be too far on her own journey to be soft about it anymore. Battling it out each day, her survival, suffering desperately, to abate the lonliness and isolation, the fear and bitterness.

She will end up fighting savagely to hold on to the glimmering love she sometimes will feel for this brutal and beautiful world.