We've all been there, love. A sparkling exchange, lightning flashing in the spaces between periods, words flowing like thunder across your mind. Your heart set on fire, ringing with the echoes of what you've read, and then-

And then-

Nothing. The ballet of characters swirling around the stage of your mind, shared with another's touch, frozen in time when your last brushstroke on the canvas goes unanswered. You ask, and your answer is silence on the wind, the wires under an ocean humming with life but dead and cold for you, not bringing the next spark you've come to love. Your alter-ego is trapped in their ballet, frozen, staring into their lover's eyes, a fingertip forever just a hair's breadth from warm skin, a kiss left to be never completed. The heady flush of consummation will never die, but that moment of first, blissful being together will never come, your little world blooming from imagination beginning to show the spidering of frost already.

Can you imagine all those stories out there, forever waiting for their end? For a middle chapter, even, hovering like the pause between breaths, a million stories in their universes with space for two, shimmering in the dark world of imagination like bright, still raindrops?

Pluck one out of the air and peer into it, even; think about an ending for it. The highway patrolman and the beautiful girl he found broken down by the side of the road? They'll find a way to make it work, once their story clicks back into life. The secretary will run away with the janitor, love - trust me, they'll be happier that way. The elven maiden will close that last inch to her knight, the bride to her groom. Two million imagined hearts will beat again, someday. Fingers will interlace, sighs will continue mid-breath, and that shining constellation in the dark will start to shimmer.

You can't live in one of those little worlds. Not really. But for a moment, you can slip inside and close your eyes and be there. You can take my hand, and we can find a droplet hanging silent, just for us, to draw back into life or to bead a new one up like dew on the morning grass.

Hope, is what it is, really. That those stories won't stay frozen forever, that the hearts that dreamt them up will find a brighter story.

That the rain will begin to fall.