(PG)

by Delta Story

March 2001

~*~

Once upon a time, you told me that that you couldn't "define parameters". No Starfleet regulation covered our situation then, and I doubt that one does even now; no one can truly limit the boundaries of the heart.

Yet we have drawn our own boundaries, our own limitations, by all of our actions and deeds. Each of us has walked his own way, grasping at false fragments of emotional happiness, seducing our souls into believing we had found peace and satisfaction – only in the end to reach out to each other, unfulfilled and incomplete, calling each other 'friend'.

We have quarreled bitterly, snapping and snarling, probing deeply into those most secret places, those holy of holies that only we know how to hallow... or desecrate, dancing around to a profane and fatalistic masochistic waltz. But each time, the discordant tune brought us to a new level of harmony, in which we again sang in the same key, gradually harmonizing again, enraptured in the music heard by us alone.

As we begin what appears to be a long-awaited end to our journey, we once more find ourselves reaching out to unexplored territories, longing to find futile experiences to fill the depleted emptiness within ourselves… desolate voids allowed to drain dry by our own volition. Is it because in the end, when we have no more excuses, when we have to look into each other without the disguise of duty, without the structure of protocol, that we will see ourselves as empty, broken shells… shattered remains of the resilient beings we once thought we were? Are we fearful of having the curtain rend to expose the stark nakedness of our longings, revealing that all along our greatest fear has been the fear of losing each other? Without that risk of commitment... without that knowledge of love... we had nothing to lose; we remained invincible to the deepest death of all. Is that why I deemed it necessary for us to 'define parameters' so many long years ago?

Perhaps it.s now time to reset those parameters... before we lose each other forever.

~*~