Sweetest of the sunflowers, yeah, you’re the sun to me. – Zach Bryan

There is no one else in the world but us.

You appeared after the tornado, newly-breathing the rush of time in a lightly-held cafe. I saw you; you saw me. You asked me: do you prefer handsome or pretty? And when you called me pretty I felt my heart echo back: her. Our knees nestled, my motions careful, timid — do you mean it? Do you see me? Do you hear me? I felt your breath threaded like cashmere in the candlelight, and our lips hovered in the aching-potential of the summer air. You held out your hand and I asked if I could kiss you. No one had ever offered their hand to me; no one had ever asked you for a kiss. There was no one else in the world but us.

Intertwined in the ever-wyrded ellipsis of Ozarkia, we traveled north. Don’t worry, the armadillo is fine. Barely-moving, trying not to wake you, I saw you. I saw you and knew I’d share my life with you. And time crawled to a still as the sun rose, the stained glass of God’s architecture shimmering the new morning. And I held you; and you held me. The next morning, we traveled by ambulance and I met your parents. For a few moments, I was only a corpse, possibility frozen in place as my teeth chattered fear. Bonewhite knuckles sweating over a 911 call and an earth-soul walking me through. You first saw me cry in the ER, forehead to forehead solid-as-stone. Everything’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. There’s no one else in the world but us.

We woke up the next day to a rabbit’s paw. June joyed and June wept, and in the in-between we rhythmed a new life, coalescing into our happy home. No Brain July. And there it was that the future unveiled itself, a new beginning after many apocalypses; strawberry sugar and vanilla cake and honeysuckle atmosphering eternity as Teddy tossed to-and-fro in the grass of our backyard. My family: you and me and Luna and Teddy and Sable, voyaging uncertainty to find ourselves again in the hearth of one another. I now had someone (someones) to miss; I now had someone (someones) to live for. I now had us. And even in the steel of Empire, the fact remained: there is no one else in the world but us.

I don’t know if I’ve ever conveyed what you mean to me. Before I met you, my mouth was dry and my bones ached. A mountain collapsing into itself, I avalanched into the void, only to be caught again by an angel. For years, my skin stung and my breath shortened, heartaches and heartattacks constricting subjectivity into fear. I took a saw to womanhood and clawed at the boundaries of my soul until it resembled jagged glass.But, under the maple, you freckled my heart with threads of light, giggling rebirth. You said to me I know you and held my hand as I transformed, resurrecting Penelope from the ashes. Through anxiety and death and mourning and uncertainty, we wove ourselves into the bark of one another, a single oak tree emerging from two. And to that oak I return (again-and-again), to our Ithaca of primrose and thyme. To you, my Odysseus. And I know, our souls tethered together in the morninglight of coming-spring, that I always have a home there. There, swaying gently in the breeze on our back porch. There, building Lego and inhaling incense in the evening calm. There, tracing symbols on the backs of our hands, holding each other through ember and frost. There, where there is no one else in the world but us.

And every time I ask: would you fall in love with me again? And you answer back with every breath: I will. And there we remain, and there we return, and there we journey again and again – to Ithaca, to Rogers, to home. To where there is no one else in the world but us.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. – James Joyce, Ulysses Ch. 18: Penelope

Image: Country Garden with Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt (1905-1906)