Somewhere Between Here and Elsewhere
There is a place I visit that does not exist.
I find it in the silence between one heartbeat and the next. In the seconds before I remember where I am. And in the spaces where the world grows quiet enough for my mind to wander wherever it pleases.
Sometimes it begins with the glow of my computer screen. An unfinished email waiting patiently beneath my fingertips while I stare straight through the words and into another life entirely.
Sometimes it begins beneath warm water, my hand tracing the same absent circle against my skin until the world gently calls me back and I realise I have been gone for far longer than I meant to be.
You find me there...Both of you. As though dreaming is simply another way of remembering.
It never begins with grand declarations. It begins with laughter.
With the three of us existing so naturally together that it becomes impossible to remember a life that looked any different. We speak over one another. We steal glances that last just a heartbeat too long. We lean into one another without any hesitation.
Home is not a place...It is a pair of familiar smiles waiting at the end of the day. It is one hand finding mine while the other reaches for yours. It is the quiet certainty that no one is standing outside the circle we have made.
There are days, in this impossible little world, where I want to hide us from everyone.
I imagine a place far far away... with no clocks. A little house where the windows are always open and the air smells of soil and rain. The kind of place where mornings arrive slowly, where coffee grows cold because conversation is sweeter, where love stretches lazily across the hours without ever having to explain itself.
Just us.
The sky.
And enough forever to grow old together.
But dreams have a curious way of changing as they unfold. Because the longer I stay there, the less I want to hide.
Love like this was never meant to whisper.
I want to walk through crowded streets with smiles on our face and a twinkle in our eyes. I want strangers to catch us laughing until we cannot breathe. I want our hands tangled together without hesitation, without apology, without fear.
I want our love to exist in daylight. I want the waiter to smile as he sets three cups of coffee on the table.
I want photographs where none of us are missing.
I want holidays that end with sunburnt shoulders and hundreds of blurry pictures because we were too busy living to hold the camera still.
I want ordinary days.
Just ordinary Tuesdays made sacred because I get to come home to both of you.
Sometimes I wonder if the universe accidentally wrote us into different stories. Three souls who keep circling one another across lifetimes, always arriving just close enough to recognise something familiar before the dream ends.
Perhaps that is why my heart aches when I think of you. Because I am grieving something I have never had. They remain suspended somewhere between hope and impossibility, asking nothing of us except that we visit from time to time.
So I do.
I visit often.
In the pause before I press send.
In the warmth of the shower.
In traffic lights that stay red a little longer than usual.
I disappear into the life where you both exist beside me.
Where we love each other without shrinking.
Where we choose each other over and over until choosing becomes as effortless as breathing.
And then someone says my name.
The email still waits.
The water is beginning to cool.
The traffic light turns green.
The dream dissolves as quietly as it arrived.
But for one beautiful moment, somewhere between here and elsewhere...
I belonged to you.
And the three of us belonged to each other.
It was just the love of the three of us