He sat next to me while I lay on the bed; he was on the floor though, looking up at me while I stretched out my length across the bed upside down, my feet resting on the pillows. I had an arm reaching out towards him and I could feel his fingers moving up and down my forearm rhythmically.

My eyes were elsewhere though. My mind was racing nowhere fast at the pace of a bullet train in the night. I was thinking about everything, yet nothing all at the same time.

I knew the words were going to be coming out of his mouth before he even opened his lips to speak, “What are you thinking about?”

I looked over at him and smiled and the same words formed on my tongue as always whenever he asked that question, with a smile of course, “Nothing.”

He looked at my smile and nodded. Perhaps he thought I was trying to keep some secret from him, after all, he wasn’t a mind-reader or anything, and I didn’t expect him to be one, but really nothing in particular was on my mind at that very moment.

I pulled my arm from his grasp and began to stroke the side of his face. His brows were furrowed into a knot above his dark eyes. He wasn’t looking at me anymore; instead, he was watching the shadows play on the wall opposite the window, following bits of light and darkness as they mingled in the wind outside.

I went back to my thoughts and again he took his hand in mine, our fingers interlaced: his hand warm to the touch against my cold hand.

It was silent in the house except for the occasional drone of traffic from the street that passed in front of our house.

I was still lying on the bed with my feet on the pillows.

He was still sitting beside me.

Perhaps for those few moments in time that had seemed to pass, no time had actually passed. It seemed as though reality were always frozen in times like those. Transfixed in our own worlds as though statues, we thought our own thoughts, we existed within our own realms.

We were at the intersection of two personal realities where neither was understood. The only thing that was real was the warmth of his hand in my cold one and the shadows playing on the wall.

I smiled absently at my thoughts as I drifted off again and I could feel his eyes rest back on me. He leaned his head against the bed and stared off absently with a sigh that told me he was drifting off too.

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