A Name Called Rekah

Ahh… This hoarse breath carves itself into the roof of my mouth. My body has gone limp. All it can do now is lie on this white bed. Dreaming is the easiest way for me to meet you. I don't need the strength to sit up, or breath enough to say your name out loud. I only need to close my eyes, and somehow you're already there, blurred at the edges, gone the instant I try to look at you directly.

The road between us runs so long that I still haven't managed to close the distance, not even by a single city. I used to count it in kilometers, back when counting still felt like doing something. Now I only know the distance by how my chest tightens when I try to imagine crossing it, one number too large for a body this tired to hold.

Eight years have passed. Before my eyes close, I always whimper out a question, the same one, worn smooth by how many times I've asked it: "I hope you think of my name too." I say it low, almost under my breath, the way you'd handle something you're afraid of breaking.

The bed frame and the pillow that hold up the weight of my head look bored of this beggar's babble of mine. I think the walls stopped listening years ago. My mind keeps asking the same thing, over and over, circling back to only one name. It doesn't matter how tired I get, or how heavy my eyelids feel by the time the room goes dark.

The name finds its way through anyway, and impossible to stop. That name is you, Rekah.

I don't wait for any single day, not Monday, not Tuesday, not Wednesday through Sunday. The days have started blurring into each other, since none of them carry your face anyway. I wait for the longing that turns into a reunion, the one day with no place on any calendar, that comes on its own schedule and answers to no one.

Because there is no limit to loving. Not distance. Not silence. Not eight years of nights spent whispering the same question into a room that stopped answering a long time ago. Whatever this body has lost the strength to do, it can still do this: keep loving you, quietly, from this bed, for as long as it takes.