So, I laid down for a nap the other day. I closed my eyes, and for the first time that I can remember in the 6 months since you died, I felt you lying there with me. I don't know if it had to do with my sleep deprivation, or with the obituary I had helped to write the day before, or with the pot I had smoked to finally fall asleep during the night, but I felt you there, and was (am) grateful. But... my mind was whipping into a sandstorm of emotion. With my eyes closed, sensations came in clear and cutting waves, with a sickening roar of self-realization in the background, blurry but closing in. And though I was so grateful to feel you there with me, some part of my mind - of my self? - wanted to escape from the intense reality of it. To get back into a safe dome of "normalcy," I thought about watching porn to hide from it. I told myself "no," that this presence was to be savored. But, I snuck away all the same, to a haze of other sensation, safe and predictable, shallow and radiating, to masturbating before my alarm went off. And even there in my fantasies, I couldn't let myself be with you. I really miss you.