I've spent the past twenty-seven years dreaming of your shoulders. I was catatonic for most of that time, attempting to whittle my bones away until the only thing that remained were my memories of you.

Painstakingly, I would rearrange particles of dust within the air into the constellations I used to trace across your freckles. I don't know how long I did this for, but I felt I was simultaneously whiling away a moment and a millennia. Their fragile movements reminded me of you, reminded me of your breathing, reminded me how I stopped breathing and you continued on. Back then you called these obsessive habits of mine poetic and I don't know if you still would, but I wouldn't care so long as I could hear you calling me something.

I miss you so much I would kill myself if I weren't already dead.

When you amalgamate into the stillness of gravity, you begin to notice sounds you could never hear when you were busy moving. First you become acutely aware of your own body — the quiet moments of life traveling through your veins, even after you've died. Later you remember that things exist beyond yourself and you become fascinated by the sounds of life passing through the bodies of others. Finally, you realize that everything is alive, even the surreal landscape of threads surrounding you.

The weave of creation, an endlessly incoherent network of threads that stretched through the world of the afterlife, was alive. I could hear its nearly imperceptible whispering. Most of its voices spoke in languages I couldn't comprehend, until I discovered a thread that spoke like you.

Desperately, I followed it, despite the noise of my sudden footsteps overtaking your voice. I hoped it would bring me back to you; I didn't know it actually would.

Patience was never something I was very good at. At first I thought I'd wait for you, attempting to take comfort in the inevitability of your own death. Those were the kinds of morose thoughts I found twisted optimism in before I realized that time exists differently here.

In the afterlife time happens all at once. I could sense the beginning and end of all things everywhere around me, as if it were drifting through the air. Perhaps that was why I first began to obsess over reconstructing dust into my memories of you, hoping that I could pull you from it. As the infinite moments of my death ticked by, empty of you, the hopelessness of it became overwhelming. I could feel you being born, living and dying all at once; the time before, during and after your life surrounded me — maybe somewhere your soul was even near me — and still you were unreachable.

I remember telling you once that the furthest distance is the space between two people, that no matter how closely they press their bodies together there is still an uncrossable separation between them. You tried to prove me wrong and back then you were quite convincing, but not now.

I never found its end, frankly I'd have been surprised if the thread had one, but somewhere along the endless middle I found where it had been ripped open and sewn into. Split fibers were braided into other chords, repurposed into an unnatural web, creating frays at the joints that instinct told me I could travel through.

Examining the sinister tendrils that had been spliced into yours had my senses reeling in trepidation. Of what, I thankfully never knew. I told myself the dead have nothing to fear, yet found no faith in the words. These threads were also alive, but not like yours. A chorus of heartbeats thudded through them, as raw to the touch as plunging your hand into a person's chest.

Unraveling part of the foreign webwork, I picked at a tear in your thread, ripping my own pathway into it and deconstructing the barrier between our worlds. You were so close it felt as if your body were pressed into mine once more, but this time the distance between us wasn't so uncrossable.

I returned to you like waking from a dream, unsure if I was a living man who had dreamt of death or a dead man dreaming of living. To name it a dream was a lie, but at that moment I didn't care what it was. I only cared that your voice was calling to me: Dimitri, Dimitri, Dimitri. The sound was poetic.

The first I saw of you were the freckles scattered across your skin as you cradled my head against your shoulder. Each inhalation of your breath pulled them into movement like dust drifting through air. My eyes traced the imaginary threads I once connected their constellations with, forever reminding me of the one that brought me home to you.