My world is as forbidden as it is fragile

I grew up thinking that I would find true love on crossing the golden threshold into adulthood.   

We would be drawn to each other at first sight.  We would love each other enormously.   

We would empathize in every way and have magic sex.  What I didn't expect was that gravity pulls us toward so many people, and we love, or make love, or wrap our expectations around them even when in retrospect. 

They were not anyone in particular, not anyone at all.  I loved people I could never travel through life with, and who's to know the difference until its too late? 

I gathered dozens of stories; collected intimacies with dozens of beings.  They rest in the indelible ink of my past. 

And I am in theirs, carried in brain cells to distand lands and other people's beds and god knows where. 

I don't know what any of them think, which parts they remember and what they've long forgotten.