I sat in the grass, feeling the sun touch my skin with warm fingers. It reminded me of you.

These towering cliffs, gentle forests, and wide meadows warmed by your touch.

I sat on the edge of the world and watched through half-lidded eyes as low clouds drifted over the valley below. As they danced in the cool autumn breeze I listened and watched and waited to learn the name of the wind.

It called to me, it crept across my skin like a trailing finger, it spoke to me in hushed whispers and crawled from high mountain passes. I closed my eyes and felt it, listened to it speak, and when I opened them again I could finally see.

I could see it in the pattern of clouds below the crest of the hill, in the ripples of grass moving across the meadow, in the cool crevices of the painted-white spires behind me. The aimless wandering of its untroubled heart shook me to my core. For a moment, I looked away, but its wild serenade with the mountains and green meadows brought my eyes back into clarity.

I smiled at its beauty, and the wind smiled back at me. It beckoned in a twisting pattern and the name of it whispered in my ear, but I pressed my mouth closed. I couldn’t take that one name without trading it for another, I already had too many buzzing inside of me.

Your name was the most recent, it sat against my lips like a kiss.

It wasn’t the name that others call you, but the name that turned silence deafening, spun pretty words out of golden memories, shook the night with the laughter of your childlike glee. Your name is the sweet forgotten of intangible things written on scraps of paper and folded into my pocket, put through the wash never to be read again.

It’s not the shape of words in my mouth, but the hush of whispers on a warm night, the staccato of your heart, the rippling intensity of your breath as it builds to a crescendo beneath my touch. Your wild laughter in the night air like the scent of cool evergreen in my lungs.

Its all of these things and more, and more, and more…

The burning passion in your eyes helping others, the strength of your limbs, the need in your heart to be more, see more. The way the sun weaves fireflies into your hair, spinning beneath the viridian boughs of jungle trees or crashing ocean waves.

Your name dances with the soft touch of countless others in my mouth. They are all warm and lost and forgotten flames in the early hours of the morning, in the time  before the world brightens, when the moonlight still ripples on your skin and we are too distracted to sleep.

On this mountainside I don’t think of home, I think of all the names scorching my lips and the miles still yet to tread beneath these boots.

Sitting here, beneath the warmth of the sun, I forget about watching the wind scatter motes of gold across distant alps. Forget about the bells tolling from grand churches in the valleys below. Forget about the thunder of water to the east cascading over long, rocky drops.

I think of moments, of memories, of waiting for the birds to sing their first good mornings before I close my eyes.

Your name burns hotter against my lips, pressing forward to be spoken like a sweet caress against my skin, one more time.

I bite my tongue.