In my history class, my professor tells us that the Aztecs used to worship the sun.  

“Of all things to worship...” he says, pacing at the front of the classroom like a wind-up toy, “the sun probably isn’t the worst thing, right? I mean, imagine you’re an Aztec warrior. The sun is up there, so far away and so big and so powerful. If you’re going to worship something, it’s not a bad place to start.” 

I think about it for a second. The sun does seem like a good enough place to start. It is light, seeping its way into every shadowy corner of the Earth. It is heat, cradling and burning and nurturing. It is life, brushing over my skin and dancing in my vision. When I was a kid, I used to lay in it for hours, following its rays on my bedroom floor like a cozy, and content cat. 

Now I have seen the place where you lay your head and it is warm. Warm like butter-gold honey and melting syrup and warm like rays of light through the gaps of your blinds. The sun rises outside your bedroom window—I think that it is no coincidence. Of course, the sun wishes to see you every morning; to turn your skin rosy and soft; to fill your room and feed your plants; to send my head spinning like something from a dream.  

We lie together in your bed, and I wish that I could live here forever. You turn my vision soft and hazy and as sweet as tea. We sit cross-legged on your floor and drink our steaming coffee, dust dancing in rays of morning light in the corner of my eye. Outside, the birds chirp and the world begins to wake up—the clock at the town hall chimes.  

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.  

You pull a face. “It’s so early. I should be asleep right now.”  

“Sleep is stupid.” I say, taking a sip of my drink. It is hearty and warm. I can feel it flooding down my throat, settling in my stomach. I cup the mug in my hands, rest my head on my knees and push my back up against the side of your bed. You’re gazing absent-mindedly at the floor, and I wonder how it feels to be you.  

You yawn so widely that I can see the back of your throat. I’m smiling; you catch my eye and laugh. A matching one bubbles in my chest too. 

There is something undeniably soft about the feel of your carpet under my legs and about the exact intonation of your early-morning laugh. In the past, softness has felt like melancholy. It has felt like a long, rainy train ride in the dark, achingly nostalgic for a station to which I can never return. Softness has never felt like this—as warm and malleable in my hands as the sun that streams through your windows.  

Some days smell like sunshine in memory; salty water and smoky kisses and burning, brilliant sunshine. One day in late September, we spent all day at the beach. The sun beat on us from above like an overbearing parent, but we danced like kids in the waves and slept like the dead on the hot sand and let the UV sink right to our bones.  

Bone-achingly content, we sat together for the sunset. We were perched on the hill staring out to the sea, watching as the sun retreated to the horizon; watching as the world shifted from day to night; watching as the Earth spun on its eternal axis and left us behind. We got drunk and I thought to myself that the whole world looked like a painting. You rested your head on my shoulder. I could not remember ever being this happy.  

That night in the shower, I turned the tap to ‘hot’ and let the water sting my back. I lathered on Aloe Vera and walked around for the next week as red as a lobster on the plate of a rich man. My skin blistered and bubbled and peeled and itched and I remembered that more than two thirds of Australians would be diagnosed with skin cancer in their lifetime, and that more than two thousand of them would die from it each year. The Aztecs worshiped the sun because it was big and far away and beautiful, yes —but they also worshiped the sun because it was capable of terrible, terrible things.  

I wonder how the Aztecs would have felt if their Sun was sat next to them in the middle of a crowded room; if their Sun was a living, human thing perched close enough to touch, laughing over a cup of coffee.  

Inexplicably, I think of Icarus. I think of wax wings, stretching and soaring and melting and falling. I think of the way the sky would have looked; infinite and impossible; blue blending into the horizon. I think of the ocean far beneath, the way that it must have gleamed in the sunlight.  

I think of reaching. I can practically feel the warmth on my face, the glow of the sun.  

Before his fateful flight, Icarus was imprisoned. It is one detail that is often left out in colloquial retellings of his story, but an important one, nonetheless. Icarus and his father, Daedalus, were imprisoned underground. Their flight was more than a joyride—it was an escape. Daedalus built wings for them; he crafted freedom. If Icarus had stayed in the middle of the sky as instructed, he and his father would’ve made it to Samos. Instead, Daedalus was forced to watch, helpless, as Icarus crept higher and higher into the sky, closer and closer to the heavens, nearer and nearer to the sun and then—finally—further and further away.  

I used to wonder why Icarus would do something so stupid—why would he sacrifice freedom and security and safety for a taste of warmth? Now, I know that there was never another option. Now, I can only hope that, when the time comes, the wax of my wings somehow manages to hold in the way that poor Icarus’ could not. 

I want to tell you all of this. I want to tell you about Icarus and the Aztecs and the sun, but I know that the words will catch in my mouth like cotton if I try. I want to tell you about the way that my brain does this, sometimes—sends me falling down whirlpools in my own head, drowning in endless spirals, thrashing, and gulping for breath. I want to tell you about the way I sometimes feel like I am at the bottom of a bone-cold ocean. I can feel the pressure of it above me, the chill of it underneath my skin, the way that the salt makes my vision blur and darken. I can be under this ocean for days, weeks, months at a time. Drifting, drowning, dying.  

I call you once, from the barren infinity of the bottom of my ocean. I want to explain everything to you, but every time I open my mouth I choke under gallons and gallons of seawater. You are a million miles away, and your voice is tinny, and the line keeps cutting out. I am suffocating under the weight of not being able to say any of it yet, you grab my hand and help me swim. Up. Up. Up. My head crashes through the foamy surface. Saltwater rolls over my face like a ritual. It is calm. The sun shines above like an old friend. I can breathe again.  

We swim together to the shore. 

I have always been afraid to be known, but, as we sprawl like starfish soaking in the sun and swirling patterns in the soft sand, I think—for the first time—what a stupid fear this is. For the longest time, I have thought of you as the Sun, and I have thought of myself as Icarus, and I have long come to terms with the idea that it is only a matter of time before I get too close to you. 

But you are not the sun. You are not as far away as I thought; you are not perfect, and you are not cruel, and you would not send me spiraling towards death for daring to try to reach you. 

No, you are not the sun. You are not the sun, but you are a girl who carries it in jars in her pockets. You are a girl whose bedroom it refuses to miss during its morning duty; a girl who would meet me at the bottom of the ocean and who would sit with me and draw patterns in the sand. You are not the sun, and I hold your hand and I do not burn. 

In your room, we talk for hours. We sit on your floor and let the light trace portraits over our faces. You’re playing music; something soft. I let my fingers trace over the painted swirls of your bedroom walls—the same steady spirals I traced an eternity ago into the sun-soaked sand. You tap my shins to the rhythm of the song, and I smile because I am sure you will start humming along soon. The sun trickles in through your open window, curtains rustling in the breeze. You smile at me, and I am warm all over.