Get through today – you can fall apart tomorrow. Get through tomorrow, you can fall apart the day after . . .

I feel like I'm going crazy: seeing you every day but never being able to - to hold you, to touch you when anyone else is around. i just want to take your hand, kiss you, hug you, without having to hide all the time. All those things every other couple takes for granted!

...and my loneliness, always my loneliness - that airless bubble of despair that is slowing stifling me.

Time has stopped; time is racing. Lochie's lips are rough yet smooth, hard yet gentle. His fingers are strong: I feel them in my hair and on my neck and down my arms and against my back. And I never want him to let me go.

I want to tell her that I can't pull her down. I want to tell her that she has to let go of my hand in order to swim. I want to tell her that she must live her own life. But I sense she already knows that these options are open to her. And that she, too, has made her choice.

Pressed up against him, I can feel the thud of his heart against mine, his ribcase expanding and contracting rapidly against my chest, the warm whisper of his breath tickling the side of my neck, the brush of his leg against my thigh. Resting my arms on his shoulders, I pull back a little to get a look at his face. But he isn't smiling any more.

Out of the millions and millions of people that inhabit this planet, he is one of the tiny few I can never have.