While Sitting Alone In My Kitchen, Midnight, December 2, 2016

I haven't moved from this chair, honey.

I've been listening to old songs I used to play, accompanying singers at university.

I've been remembering places to which I've traveled, places at which I even then imagined other places I'd travel as my life's journey continued.

I've been crying at the good times and bad times, the sad days and the funny nights, spent in my youth with good friends and potential lovers, recalled in my adulthood with minor regret and major relief.

I've been tasting the San Franciscan salt water on my lips,

feeling the grass on the back of my neck while lying beneath a Canterburian tree,

smelling the inimitable magic of greasewood permeating our Southwestern breezes after every sundown,

caressing the gossamer hair of my babies' slumbering heads as I held each in my increasingly confident arms while carrying them to their beds,

caressing the gentle skin of your sensuous face as I hold you in my increasingly passionate arms while lying with you in our bed,

hearing the polyrhythmic symphony of Manhattan's buzzing vocal and boisterous vehicular traffic before Broadway matinees in summer,

meandering across the ironically chilly Floridian beach whose moist sand froze my feet and my soul with the former convincing belief that my life would be evermore bereft and vastly alone as the mid-Atlantic ocean I looked out into,

shaking with the giddiness at remembering the "first times":

the cold smoothness of the real ivory keys on that giant grand piano at my first recital,

the cold flush of sweat beneath my tingling hair as she held my hands at the middle school dance,

the Rocky Mountains and the London skyline from the airplane window,

the inescapable disappointment when the right argument resulted in the wrong effect for the first time,

the humbling joy when the most hopeless circumstances resulted in the most gratifying condition for once,

looking into Johann's deep eyes and seeing his soul from the day of his birth and every day since,

hearing Joaquin's great laughter and seeing his soul from infancy and every day since,

reading your words, hearing your voice, and knowing your soul before even experiencing all of you on the day we met and every day since, every single day that I'm grateful on my knees for -

Well, like I said, I haven't moved from this chair, honey,

for with all of these thoughts and feelings, I keep writing names, and "Elizabeth Angelique Campos" keeps coming out.

I hope you'll read all these messages, honey, because my beleaguered and impassioned soul is overwhelmed, as if we've been making love, and I must stand up from this chair now.

I love you so much. I love us so much.

I hope I haven't awakened you.