Those nights you have that moment. That moment when she’s curled up next to you on the couch and you can feel her warmth and her breath across your neck and the words she whispers felt more than heard when she says I love you and her eyes are closed and shes drifting off and all is right and God is nigh and presently you’re very aware.

You’re aware of the box fan blowing the artificial breeze across your face. And the wood beams crisscrossing over your head placed by a craftsman before your time whose skill far outpaces your own. You’re aware of the silence of the night outside and the sound of nothing but hundreds of miles of wild country stretching from a quarter mile north of where you lay all the way to the coldest ocean in the world and you’re aware of miles of empty space going up between you and the passing satellites overhead that you saw with your own eyes not twenty minutes ago when you stepped outside to breathe in the night and you saw the green river and a milky road through the heavens and a trillion different lights some reflected some self sufficient and you were aware then too…..

You were aware then too of a million different galaxies and an infinitude of planets and uncounted years of timed infinity that stretch like an invisible thread going back a thousand generations and you think about the multitude that came before you that felt her breath on their necks and her warmth on their bodies because they too were aware because back then it was so much easier without all the fake lights man made because they were scared of the real ones or maybe they just thought the real ones weren’t enough. You were aware of millions of touches and deep searching gazes and fierce passions and fiery winter nights or cool summer evenings where their love gave life to more love like intersecting vines running roughshod through time and all of that lead to you laying here with your arm around her and the smell of her shampoo in your nostrils while she breathes easy……easy….sixty beats per minute keeping time to the never ending march towards the future that keeps coming even when time stands still, like right now.

And you have that ache that’s always there when you’re aware. That weight of the gentle but inevitable tide rising over your head and your stomach’s in your throat and there’s water in your eyes and it’s hard to breath because why would you want to stop thinking about it all just to breathe…….

And then you breathe.

Up Here.