I want to tell you everything.

I want to tell you how gently he kissed my forehead, and how warm his body felt as I shifted in the night. I want to tell you how natural and serene it felt to twine my fingers into his and lean my body against him as we waited for the stoplight to change. I want to tell you it was a good thing his roommates weren’t home most of the time we were, and about quietly resting my foot on top of his knee while he told me a story over the sunlit kitchen table.

I want to tell you everything. But, it’s not only my story. And this one is still being written, still has a few more “Choose Your Own Adventure” plot twists available, and the ending of it could be sooner or farther than we know.

So, I’ll try my best not to tell you that it was only when I was finally unpacking my suitcase in Oakland that the tears that had surged and abated in airports across America finally fell. Or the relief I felt stepping into the open air of the BART platform and looking around at the hodge-podge of people I’ve grown so familiar with. I’ll try not to tell you about the dull and persistent ache of withdrawal.

He’d said, “escaping the world” once when we were planning this.

I’m sure all vacations have their hangovers. The return to grim reality, and also to familiarity. The return to my own coffee pot and car and a toothbrush that doesn’t fold in half. There’s a relief and a longing. Like finishing a delicious meal and finally placing down your fork, overfull, yet wishing you could savor it all again.

You remember the small moments. The ones where you took a deep, satiated breath. The angles of the New England homes you drove past on ancient winding roads, and the spray of the Atlantic, blue today, over the rocks. You remember playing with his pinkie finger while you waited for your pregnant waitress, looking, still self-consciously, out the window by your table, since it was only day 2 and you felt new and strange and uncertain.

You try to remember everything. To etch it into consciousness, since it will certainly fade, the exact tightness of his arms around you while you lay naked against him; the exact way his chest hair curled while you fiddled with it musingly; the exact timbre of his echoing laughter under the short kitchen ceiling.

I’d told you before I left that I imagined being held delicately and protectively and surely by him, and that for once, I wasn’t frightened of it. Well, friends, it was true. And though we’ve taken fantasy and pulled it into the realm of reality, with all its attendant Yeses and Finallys and Contentedness, … we also both took the courageous move to explore the exact shape of reality’s rough edges and Almosts and Not Quites.

And should it be once again with the man this time was spent with, and should it be another person completely: I am buoyed to know that I can rest in the arms of a man, with no thought of escape.