By Vicky Rogers

It’s early,

the sun is barely up itself,

you turn to face her, still asleep beside you.

A pristine person placed gently on this earth,

crafted with love and goodness.

With each breath her chest rises and falls;

she looks more and more like she belongs beside you.

You try to match her breaths,

longing to be intertwined.

Perhaps you are.

She invited you into her life,

her home,

her bed.

And you slept with her,

between her sheets, sharing secrets.

For the first time in your life,

you felt seen.

She looked at you as though you were worthy of all the goodness she could give,

and my god did it feel good.

You were intertwined both by your minds and by your limbs, long and slender.

She made you feel good and whole and warm,

like the sun makes you feel when you’re lying on the grass and you have no worries in the world.

You were her favourite dress,

perfect and beautiful and with pockets for her notes and secrets.

You let her into your mind like she let you in between her patterned sheets.

I’d been told all through my life that loving as I do is sinful,

wrong;

something to be ashamed of.

I had been,

until I met her.

She made me feel that I had nothing to hide and certainly no want to.

For how could loving her be a sin?

With the way she breathed and lived and had a mind of gold and sapphire and pearl.

For how could loving a being so heavenly, warrant hell?

And as I lay next to her, I realised it didn’t.

I realised that all these years of wishing to love not as I did, but as so many other girls do, could simply fall away.

They could be battered and banished and locked in a drawer,

left to rot.