Ring slipped on, we pay cash for an hour in a motel room a few miles down the highway. The rain coming down hard still, we feel safe and warm together within these walls, under this roof, under these covers. We are sloppy and frantic and love you love you love you against our skin. And then we are painstaking and careful and we never want to let go.

We are on the verge of everything. We are filling up and up and up, trying so hard but failing so miserably to keep it all in. We are laughing as we catch our breath. We cannot stop laughing, smiling, kissing each other’s faces and necks and shoulders.

We are staring at the ceiling, our sides pressed against one another. We are stretching our hands out in front of us, broad gestures about the rest of our lives We are making plans, the kind that are too big to even think about. The kind that make us dizzy with the future stretching endlessly out in front of us. We have forever and then some, forever and anything, everything, that comes after. We have so much, too much. We don’t know what to do with our hands but hold on.

We exist only to each other, for each other, for 57 minutes. We count freckles and eyelashes and teeth. We test our memory of each other’s bodies, lives, hearts. We watch the gray through the window with our limbs tangled up tight.

With each minute reluctantly slipping by, we say, “Do you really have to get back?” We say, “Please, stay.” We say, “Forget the world for the afternoon, stay in bed with me, please please please.” We say, “I miss you. I love you. I want this to start right now.”

We say, “You, you, you, you,” because it seems like the only thing that’s ever mattered at all.

We say, “Finally, finally,” as our eyes start to flood because the past is always present but we can only be grateful for it now, because even though it has scarred us, it has also shaped us, made us into this and this is perfect, this is everything we have ever wanted, this is the only place we were ever meant to be and that was the only way we could have ever gotten here. We are whole and complete and never ending, holding hands under a scratchy comforter in a rain soaked motel.