“You’re okay?” he says. “I’m…” Everything, I want to say. I’m everything I’ve never been, everything I didn’t even know to ask for, because I didn’t know it existed. This feeling of completion. Of no longer knowing the beginning or the end of me, but not minding one bit, because at the borders of it there was still this: a person who knows me. Who looks at me like this. Who holds my face in his hands and stares at me with such unselfconscious, unselfish care that it suddenly feels absurd to me that I spent so much of my life without it. That I settled for the brief, cheap shine of any other
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