Only You

can i hold you forever?

We wake up in each other's arms as the morning light creeps into the room, seeping through the magic of last night, bathing us in a soft pool of secrets and an endless stretch of future. 

I feel Cate's hand move on my shoulder, warm against my bare skin. I nuzzle closer to her, like an infant seeking warmth. She gives a little sigh, the way she always does when she's waking up, and then I'm looking at her calm blue eyes, blinking sleepily at me. 

"Let's wander the town today," she says drowsily, but neither of us move from bed for a long time. 

This moment, from waking up and seeing Cate next to me, to the sight of her pale freckled arms, to the smell of her soft yellow hair that's resting on my forehead, it wraps itself up into a luminous sphere and I place it deep in the core of my heart, because I know that this moment is something that will give me strength when we have to face reality again soon. 

"I love you," I whisper.

She pulls me closer. 

"I love you, Cate Blanchett."

But Cate teases me throughout the day, tilting up her cigarette with an arrogance that both amuses and nonplusses me, winking at me at intervals, glancing at me when she thinks I'm not looking. 

"Do you have any particular time you need to be back home?" Cate asks as we wander from store to store, admiring little trinkets that could only have been made by people who have walked these streets a thousand times over, who have known where they live and where they belong their entire lives.

"Please let's not talk about that," I say, letting my hand trail through a rack of handmade scarves. 

"About what?"

I stop to admire a scarf I think would look lovely on Cate. "About...where we came from."

"You act like we're fugitives."

"We are, in a way." I look at her and smile. "Aren't we always running from something? We're doing what everyone secretly wishes they could do."

 "But what about your parents?"

I look away from her, slightly annoyed she would ask about them as if I was a child she was babysitting. "They won't care. I'm an adult, Cate."

"Jude, do you think I'm patronizing you?"

When I don't answer, she comes to my side and wraps a scarf around my arms, as if tying me up, so that I break into a laugh. "Well?"

"Are you, Cate?"

"No. I just don't think it's possible for parents not to care." She looks into my eyes, and there's a silent challenge in them, daring me to deny her statement. Of course, I think, she is a mother, she has borne a child and loved a person in a way I've never known. Her gaze seems to thrust me far away from her, so that everything I thought I knew about her falls away like a fake sequin gown. 

"Well, my parents don't seem to. They probably won't even realize I'm gone." I take the scarf from my arms and drape it back over the rack. 

"Don't you ever talk to them?"

"Cate--" I begin, then stop. I don't feel like talking about myself, not here, not now. My mind flits back to that evening in the library at school--how long ago that seems now, and how distant, like the memory of something I never experienced but heard from someone else. And everything about me feels so detached from me, even the memory of my sister feels now like fresh skin that emerges from under a scab. Everything had faded away from my mind since the moment I met Cate. 

A hopeless feeling then spreads over me, as I realize that Cate and I know so little about each other after all. I couldn't hide anything from her, but in a way I feel I have, unintentionally, because I was so obsessed with the image of what she and I are, a hologram of the two of us spinning in perfection for infinity. 

She watches me calmly, waiting for me to speak. Out of the corner of my eye I see the store owner looking at us curiously. 

"I'll talk about it later," I say. "I promise. I just don't feel like it now."

She waits, then her eyes glance down as if in surrender. "Well. That's fair. You really do promise?"

"Promise."

She nods once, and I know she knows I mean it. "How about splitting up for a bit?" she says. "Meet at the café on the corner in about half an hour?"

"Okay," I say. I remember then that it's Christmas Eve.  

There was a store we passed that I knew was exactly where I'd get Cate's present. It's a ceramics shop, full of handmade clay figures painted in exquisite detail. 

The elderly lady sitting at the counter smiles at me as I walk in. I choose a little figurine of an angel girl, who looks up at the sky with calm eyes and her magnificent wings outstretched. It is Cate. I know it from the second I lay my eyes on it. 

"A Christmas present for someone special?" the lady asks with a friendly twinkle in her eyes as she wraps it. 

"Yes."

"Well, he must be a very fine young man for you to get him something like this."

I only smile in return. After buying the ceramic angel, I go to an old fashioned stationary shop and buy a little notepad of beautifully designed paper, then bend down over the counter and write my Christmas poem for Cate.

You are an angel, radiant and proud 

You are summer rain pouring down on the desert that is me

You are snow caught in eyelashes

You are whispers of forest leaves

You are a world created in flawless splendor

Cate, can I hold you forever?

I feel that a million Christmases wouldn't be enough

To give you all I wish I could.