A cornflower wind whispers through the ash blond hair of an eleven-year-old girl. Her blue eyes are large and luminous over a spate of freckles and very white teeth. Eyes that mirror her laughter as she runs into the choppy scrub beside the asphalt road. Sitting on a tarry dogwood stump is a boy, his shaggy brown hair a week past due for the summer buzz cut unique to the school-free sports-minded male of eleven. Their jeans have green smears at the knees, and her elbow is covered with a bandage that doesn't quite cover the long scrape of a bicycle accident.

She stops a few feet from him, suddenly shy, and peers up through long lashes. There is something that reaches down past hormones and desire and adult ideas of attraction; something that simply says that "boy meets girl" is as much a natural law as entropy and inertia. He gives her a gap-toothed grin as he bends to kiss her cheek.

And love comes to Subreality.

Normally, at least in my case, this would lead to some gruesome conclusion involving meat hooks and gene splicing. And undoubtably, somewhere that very thing is happening. But here, in this single golden moment, it becomes a simple case of young love.

Connections across nothing, building a reality of emotions which have more strength than any other incarnation or belief in Subreality. The collective unconscious is a romantic, you know. It has to be, or risk becoming no longer human.

I'm sitting in the coffee shop and watching a couple in the corner booth. They exchange short whispers, silent gestures, tiny affections that tell the world that they are validated by one single value, and that the rest is details. Are they fictives, muses, writers? Does it matter?

They don't notice the rest of us, hunched over cups of coffee and newspapers; everyone sneaking glances at their shared happiness and feeling vaguely guilty. It's as if we were enviously intruding on someone's private thoughts. Zero/Beth has a smile for them. They don't see me leave. It doesn't matter. In a world where thought is reality, they are utterly alone together.

Love is a tricky emotion. It is both pure and corrupt; like a drug that overwhelms us all no matter how we fight against it. Only a select few cannot love, and we have a word for them: sociopaths. Love is like becoming half of the world, and only the other half can make any kind of balance.

Who wouldn't fight for that?

I can see the baby crying from here. Her parents are the gods of creation now, their love not shared but amplified to now encapsulate the biological proof of their union. Is that why we writers are so afraid of parenthood?

We already create worlds of prodigy as a matter of course, taking on the duty of caretaking and nurturing it into maturity. Can sharing that with another be thinkable? Acceptable? More so, do we orphan one "child" for another?

Her first word will be "up." I know these things.

He nervously brushes the hair out of her face in their first intimate gesture on the patio of the Cafe. She smiles and ducks her head, copying the same gesture as if to imprint it in her memories. Their gaze is liquid, embarrassed, joyful. A stew of emotions and ideas and dreams left hanging in the pregnant silence between them. Words without voices and stories better heard unspoken.

She went looking for love and found understanding. He went looking for sex and found happiness. They went looking for solutions and found fate. I went looking for truth, and found a quiet outcropping that juts far into the water.

He is old, ancient even. The red glasses and bent lank frame are enough to identify him, although whose he was originally is lost to me. He brought roses. Every week he brings them and plucks each satin petal to cast into the waters that claimed the other half of his life on a cold December night. Each falls like a drop of blood and is instantly claimed by the swirling waves.

We talked on the beach, and he told me that his wife refused to give up her boat, even though the cold water made her bones ache and the salty spray left her near blind at the end of the day. She died as she needed to live, and even in his grief, he was happy for her. He refused to regret an instant, and brings her roses each cold Friday.

I've heard his story a thousand times in a thousand ways. It started long before him, and will continue long after.

He shudders as she touches him, and smiles nervously. A touch that traces fire down his soul, a caress that replaces thought. They kiss once, twice, three times. They live in the instant, each moment of pleasure replaced by an equally impossible moment. Her skin is like silk. His scent is like joy. Each breath and whisper is a covenant of devotion, perhaps not forever, but for this moment eternally.

There are darker manifestations, of abuse and lust and vicious carnality. But those have no place in this moment. They are the dark shadow that can only be created by the overpowering light that the emotion casts. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

I'll deal with the shadow later. I need the light to remind me why it's worth the pain of it.

The rain mists down. It turns salty as it mixes with the tears and drips off her nose. Their hair is sprinkled with light, in the perfection of the summer rain. The reason it sounds cliched is because it is. Cliches are powerful in Subreality, since they always have a way of turning up. "What always was shall be again" is part of natural law here.

She kisses her, water and tears and lips fusing them into a single entity for the length of their embrace. All the horror and brutality and grinding effort of life justified in that one long moment of contact; a series of moments in which to string your dreams on.

It comes down to who you trust in the dark times. Who you can believe in the tenderloin of the morning when fate forces absolute trust in another human being.

They're into the third hour, when the frantic passions of lovemaking cool to slow caresses and exchanged intimacies. The time when the masks finally slip away and the walls come down for just a while. Existing in the pleasure of emotion and stimulation.

There is laughter with their arousal, the sign of lovers taking sex as pleasure, as opposed to need. Smiling eyes and eager lips; the meeting soul to soul without fear or artifice. Loving the one you're with wholly, even if only in that moment.

They've been saying goodbye for the last hour. He keeps drawing her back for one more kiss, before she leaves to cross the Atlantic. I remember it from the fic. It was never as rich as it is now.

She touches his cheek. He buries his nose in her dark brown hair. His harsh accent is softened in his soft whispers, and a few tears spill down her face. It's about that connection for even a moment. A moment in the light to carry us during our walk through the darkness alone.

Why the fascination in love when I'm preparing to delve into the darkest elements of sick fascination in the minds of the writers of this realm? Because you need to remember what it is you're doing this for; the breath of wind and the touch of light.

It's the dream of grass stained knees, a sprinkling of freckles, and the scent of spring in the air. Finding happiness past the complications and confusions of human nature. About laughter at the end of the night, and the persistence of joy.