He smells of river and coconut trees. In the city he comes from, it is a taboo to fall in love. In the city I come from, there is a piece of my heart beating in another's body.

Sometimes we sit on an abandoned rock at night. Sometimes he settles my hair and whispers in my ears. Sometimes it's morning when I return and peacocks cry from a distance.

There's a house we've built which smells of river. It hangs in the air like a supersecondary structure with random strokes of gray-blues, the colours of dreams. It twists, turns, sashays and morphs to form new structures.

Whenever the river of his place feels lonely, it looks at the space between its fingers - that is where the silty, slender fingers of the plains will perfectly fit in.

And there, sometime at the terrace of our House that-can-never-exist, sometimes under the sky that has neither stars nor moons, sometimes behind the bushes where crickets sing, I surrender to him like river surrenders to land.