The weight of the comforter is not enough, I turn and wrap my arms and legs around her to feel my body next to something. She tells me to move, she’s hot and does not like to be held down, I turn away and tell her I wanted only to hold her, not to hold her down. "Same thing", she says, but I disagree.

I crave the passion but can accept a love built on comfort as long as we watch out for potholes. With conversations, we fill the landscape with sand and tread over them to build a solid path. This works for now. My fear is the high tide, hurricane, storm that comes rupturing through. I fear wind will blow away the sand and I’ll look on each side of me and have nowhere to go. The terrain will only be holes—filled in, emptied, refilled. The land will crumble. Will I regret a refusal to see that filling the void was all I knew. Can I handle that the joy was in holding it together—not what we had when we were.

It’s the not knowing that pulls me away from her. The distrust that something is always underneath the surface, that she is not happy. I am not happy. Part of me yearns to be alone—to suffer, drink, write, spend hours at work, leave town on a whim. Part of me wants no responsibility. There is a fear that this love is comfort. Unable to see the dark side, I imagine it huge, growing larger, not sure if the bulk of it is beautiful or ugly.

You can hide a lot under comfort, under the weight of it all. I do not hold the past as memory, I build it as fat and muscle. The continuous growth from lessons learned with each new love, the continuous backslide of wanting someone, something, searching for a feeling you had in the past, trying to make your current lover be the best traits of all that have come before.