A SEA OF FIRE
          
 ( ... ) Along the coast, as the summer ends, a new summer begins. The nights are colder, the sun is weaker, but the sea is still warm. In the warmth of the afternoon, he walks along the grass-to-sand edge of the house, circling it, painting a fence around it with his body, protecting it.  She is asleep inside, dying inside, he is awake.

For ten years they were lovers… an 'affair of the heart', he called it.
"But you are a thief of hearts," she would say.
"And what are you," he would say, "my victim?"
"No," she would whisper, " your loot."

For ten years they touched each other's skin; they slept together and bathed together. They stared into each other's eyes until their eyes went dark. They whispered their names in a thousand different phrases, in a hundred gestures, in silences that flooded the memory with music. They went to places, walked along streets, lonely together because they couldn't share with other people. Afraid to share, afraid to lose a moment, because above all, their passion for each other glowed… green like sea fire, glimmering like a delicate, thin glass, floating on their fingertips, buoyant from their breath, waiting to shatter if either one of them so much as blinked. They believed, he believed, that one day they would fall asleep together and never wake up. They would cross from white to black… no shades or colors in between… the most dangerous expense of life.

Then it came. Now she is falling asleep… and he is awake.

(... )

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