Tired but unable to catch hold of sleep. All the tricks failing. Newly showered, clean and fabric softener scented pajamas, damp hair... the things that make me yearn almost tangibly for pillows and blankets and sleep.

Too many thoughts crash around inside my head and the book I'm re-reading doesn't want to be put down. Even when I do close it, the story I already know still something I don't want to leave, even then my mind is too loud for sleep.

Suddenly what comes to me is that his love is like wrapping paper. It is real and beautiful and lays over top of me, surrounding me. These are the early days. I suspect that, given time, it will transmute into something thick and warm and enveloping, something that moves through me as well as surrounds me.

Thoughts jostle inside me, lost birds with broken wings that can't be still and can't quite take flight. But alive, bristling with life so brightly it is almost painful. Their hurts will mend and they will fly. But for now they are confused and impatient, trying to sort themselves out.

Between that paragraph and this one was an extended silence. The kind of awkward silence you find in an almost empty library where people sit with books they aren't very interested in because they feel like they should be sitting there with books, as if they are extras in the background of a movie and the action hasn't started and occasionally someone coughs that little cough of "yes, this is very awkward" that throats somehow produce better than facial expressions can convey.

I believe that means this is finished.