He hated the fact that his hands were drawn to touching me. Touching my hair, my hands, the crook of my elbow to the curve of my hip. He hated every moment he spent touching me, because he could feel, literally feel the smoothness of my electric blanket drowning him in water and fire. Elements of warmth too hot, too scalding, too quenching for the darkness he was used to. Haggard were the features of his soul. It was burnt around the edges and bitten off somewhere in the middle. The bite marks were unmistakeable. Someone had ripped off a chunk of his essence and sold it to the devil with the flaming red hair and icy blue eyes. In that moment as I stared into the void of everlasting grief that flowed outwards from the spring of his birth, I understood. I accepted everything he had been, all the suffering he had caused to my naive, innocent heart, the agony he must have, unknowingly, been going through himself. Somewhere in my heart, somewhere in the depth of one layer reaching deeper into another, I had always known that through the mess and chaos, a pure love lay, waiting to be touched and caressed out of the ashes and into the light.

He took my hands in his and seared his eyes with the pain of a man who was all too familiar with the scars of goodbye. Forevers compromised by human existence. Where souls are contained in bodies and bodies must go, always go.