You are my apricity,
the warmth of the sun in winter.
A warmth that arrives like something long-awaited and faintly cherished, you give me warmth with your touch as if your hands have memorized the cartography of wintered skin, as if they know precisely where the cold has been hiding in me all this time. My sweetheart, we will be old and decrepit, yes, but my love for you will be greater, greater than the slow erosion of years, greater than the way time insists on wearing names thin. Your warmth feels like spring in the middle of winter, reaching deep within my ribs where it patiently unseals the last remaining ice, layer by deliberate layer. Just like your arms shielding me from harm, I am kept warm by your fidelity, by the way you remain where the world is inclined to be distant.
There are presences time cannot abrade, impressions it fails to dull, and yours is among them. I will always remember your presence, the way it enters and leaves something gentler behind, the way it keeps me tethered to hope. I will always remember your raven hair, falling like vines along the edges of twilight, dark and tender in its descent, and your smile, just as sweet as honey, loosening the tightness in my chest, reminding me how to breathe without bracing myself. And as I remember you, please remember too my capacity for love, for it is yours, I offer it to you as a gentle love with the depth of the sweetest disposition, given freely, without demand, without calculation, how it stretches beyond constellations stitched into the night, descends deeper than the unexplored worlds beneath the sea, it's all yours to
keep; because even when love itself had fallen into disrepute in my eyes, you remained the truest form of it to me. Memories may fade, but the soul never forgets another soul, and mine will always know yours, even if your face thins beneath the tide of time, even if distance draws us to opposite ends of the world where language falters and only recognition endures. My apricity, your gaze is sunlight leaking through trees in the aftermath of a long-held frost, as your warmth lathers my skin and heats me from within. And if love must transcend space and time to remain truthful to itself, then let it endure, let it persist, let it remain where I will always find you: in warmth.
