Coming from a place where we display our loyalties in the intricacies of our creased palms and deserve prequels, epilogues, and histories, I knew anchors, like your name. I knew fate, knew fortune, knew the caress of a long-awaited, long-promised future, and you knew tenderness, agony sometimes, with jagged scars and dampened lashes. Coming from this place, a place where a blessing might be disguised as someone you’ve known far too long to still be a stranger, I knew the reflection of a starry-eyed blind poet and her deafened romantic. They knew golden dawns, forlorn sand in doorways, nestled in a damp windowsill, grazing the borderline of love and loneliness, pulverized destinies, sacrifice, everything. In a place we knew–everything we knew–the affection and sorrow, both mine and yours, the ideals of it all, as everything we knew we wanted was swept up in the wind with a heavy sigh and carried away.