The morning light streams through the window and onto your skin like a silk scarf wrapping around our bodies. Your skin-so warm to the touch-seems to glow and as I kiss your arm, I feel myself fall more in love. We are nestled under a fort of our own making-a collection of comforters and pillows thrown together to create this fantasy world that is a testament to how we are children at heart.
In this whimsical world of our creation, I see the twinkling of our tree’s white Christmas lights dancing outside the sheer makeshift roof we created using a combination of bed sheets and duck tape. There is something oddly magical about this fort, as though the walls of our world held up by nothing more than chairs could somehow shield this love. Outside the December cold-so abrasive and harsh-whips against the faces of those passing by and nips at their heels as another work week stretches out before them. Out there the realities and obstacles, beauty and pain of life sit lurking on street corners, while in here the dimmed lighting of our fort mixing with vanilla daylight pouring through the window’s blinds lends the room a feeling of being far removed from New York City.
In this make believe world of our own making, this love we share is warm and innocent, wide-eyed and whimsical, impervious to the trials and tribulations life can so often toss in the way of new love. My need to protect this love is how I imagine a parent must feel when holding their newborn in their arms for the very first time. That same awe-inspiring adoration, that same unwavering and unyielding love and that same inherent desire to keep something so pure and so beautiful safe and protected.
Worries of falling victim to the same traps as past relationships swirl in my mind. Fears of one day missing your touch, of not waking up to your sleepy smile as you dreamily whisper “I love you” clench my heart in a vice grip. I would live and die by this love, would throw myself on the sword to protect it and somehow this simple fort feels like the manifestation of my desire to keep this romance safe.
Our fort’s roof dips down comically. I listen to your rhythmic breathing as you sail on the wings of your dreams, the sound mixing with the light scribble of my pen dancing across this page. An aggressive knock at the door-the super no doubt droning on about an apparent leak-interrupts our reverie and rips you away from this moment that had felt suspended in time mere seconds before.
We can’t stay in this fort forever-it’s unrealistic to shield even this most precious of loves from the world for it is that thirst for life, that sense of adventure we both want to spend our lives sharing that bonds us together. As the saying goes, “where there is love there is life” and I know that we will never be the type to hide in the comfort of a love that has the power to give us the world. I’ll have faith, unwavering faith, in all that we are and all we are yet to become; and just like that I let the cotton sheet walls of our fantasy world collapse around me, let the chairs pull back, the pillows be put away and I get up and step into the light with you.
