There was me before there was we.

Me had plans and big ideas. But me was a fiction. Me was quaint. Me took up the room.

I wish I could have explained what happened to me. I would have told me about we. I would have said that we have a strong back. We laugh. We are a shelter, a thick pair of socks. We actually exist.

"You aren't real," I would have told me. "I know you think you are. I know you think you're important. And I want you to feel the full, pressing weight of my love for you when I tell you that you are, at best, a scarecrow. But you will be more. When you are we."

But I know how well me would have listened.

For a time I resented the loss of me. It took time and your patience (you have more than you think, I am proof of this) for me to see what what the hole left by me, the hole that was me, would be filled with.

I did not understand that me did not die, that me never lived. Me merely wanted. But we do not want, not often. We live. We reach.

I started dreaming again this year. I hadn't much for, god, a decade? But I started again. Next to you. While we lumbered our sheets into knots and snored our way to the baby's milk breath of waking. I started to dream of mundane and silly things, and I clutch it now, terrified that I will lose it again. Like I could have lost we. But we were too strong for that, weren't we.

Me sometimes cries out to be allowed back home. Me howls like a tattered haint. Me doesn't understand that there is no home for a ghost, that ghosts have no eyes, that I will suffer no living thing to be haunted by me.

Cutting me loose to drift left scars behind, most of which you patiently hacked into me. I owe you a lifetime for that loving violence. Because now me is you is we is us is everything.

Sometimes I don't know whether to weep or sing or kneel or grab you hard. But then I let my hands go slack and I think:

Look what we did.