If I reach out...

I'm staring up at the blue sky above me, not really thinking. Not really seeing it.

It seems as though I'm staring up into your eyes, the same blue color...and I feel like I did the first time I saw you. I feel lost in them. As though, somewhere, inside your blue gaze...I could find myself. Everything I ever wanted to know or do.

I can't explain it, really.Ê When I first saw you...I already knew who you were. We'd never met, but somehow I "knew." I called you "Elly" that first time, a name that I was certain I had never spoken, but one that seemed familiar to me. As if I'd spoken it all along. I felt close to you, somehow...

And my heart ached with pain. I felt some kind of loss at the time when I spoke "Elly" for the first time. I wasn't able to understand then. I haven't been able to understand now.

But I also felt some kind of warmth. Affection, perhaps? It seems odd...how can I have affection for someone I don't know? And you seemed to have it too. We were meant to be enemies, but I couldn't bear to see you that way. I knew that you didn't want to see me that way either. You were just afraid to look at what you were doing then.

Afraid...like I am now.

Many places I've been to, since I met you, have seemed somehow familiar to me. Distantly...memories that aren't mine come calling to me in my dreams. I remember walking down streets, bringing my fist down against a wall, typing, and painting a beautiful woman in white with gentle strokes. Painting her the way I saw her. The way she saw herself.

I faintly remember holding hands with someone, a fragile person. The look of concern in their eyes, boundless caring and love. Those same, blue crystal eyes. And I always whisper that one's name...I always whisper "Elly."

A dream I once had in the forest where we met has been coming back to me many times now. It's a strange one, that I cannot understand in the least.

People are leaving. They are heading underneath the burning sun, leaving me in the hot desert by the hordes. I run after them, a child then, calling and screaming. But they don't hear me. I stop and pant. Are they dead? Am I?

And a woman's shadow comes over me. I look up and see a woman with red hair, in a white dress, smiling down at me. She reaches out with her hand, speaking in soft tones. But I don't hear. I'm staring at the chain on her neck, at the jewelry hanging on it. A golden, ruby-studded cross, glimmering in the sunlight.

I remember seeing it before. In the painting? Yes, in the painting in Nisan...of the woman, the beautiful woman...I suppose it must be her in the dream. But the woman herself seems so familiar, though I've never seen her in real life. It seems like I have. Like I've heard her soft voice, kind and gentle, seen those blue eyes before...seen the cross that had hung on her neck in the painting and in the dream.

I think of that...and I seem to think of you. You look so much like that woman in the dream, in the painting...and part of me seems to see the cross hung on your neck. Your hand reaching out to my small one, my child one, and you voice speaking in motherly comfort...

I love you. It seems as though I have always loved you, even before I met you that day. As though I have always been in love with you, with "Elly." Emotions flicker and die in me...flames getting snuffed out in a sharp breeze.

The feeling of loss hangs over me still. The feeling that I have to get close, but that I shouldn't. As if something will happen to you, to both of us, if I do...

I turn my gaze from the blue sky and stare at the ground for a few seconds, then I close my eyes and take in a deep. When I open them and look up, straight ahead at what's in front of me, I see two blue crystal orbs staring back at my own eyes.

You have the same gentle look that you have had since the day I met you. The wind blows your long red hair into the air behind you, and your hands twitch at your sides. You smile. I smile back.

I want to say something, to reach out then and now...but I can't. The fear is still inside me, the aching loss burns, and I can't swallow either down. I want to tell you, but I can't...I love you, but...

...If I reach out to you, will I lose you?