We lay in bed on a Saturday morning in San Francisco. Heat creeps through the cracks in the doors and windows as summer has just barely made itself known, still behind the mask of a March spring that stares back the foggy and rainy winter months.

Laying side by side, our arms barely touching, and looking out of our own eyes. Our bellies rise and fall at a perfectly mismatched rhythm—hers, at its fullest when mine is exhaled, and mine inhaled when hers has released.

These mornings, I have time to wonder. And not only time, but courage, laying next to her. My thoughts are of adventures and possibilities, all dressed in happiness and ecstasy. This, freed from the anxieties of corners and code and other certainties in a weekday world. I wonder about where we will go today, what we will achieve. With all the means in our pockets and handfuls of ends to choose from.

I wonder if we might take the ferry across the bay to Sausalito. Or drive across the bridge and climb Mount Tam. Or even find a corner of a coffee shop to pour our adventures and possibilities onto paper and canvas—thus to have literature and painting as mediums of our ecstasy, just the same as we would have played them out in reality.

I wonder, as she reads a book of poetry that she has picked off the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. I smile to myself, so deeply satisfied to be with someone who will pick up a book to read as I write. I should not form my beloved in the shape of my own desires but sometimes I cannot help it.