I watched her sleeping from a chair beside her bed. Not touching, just simply watching. I told myself it was to make sure she was alright, but somewhere inside me, I know I was consoling myself. Despite fixing her house and insisting she was alive and would return, there was a part of me that was terrified that she truly was gone.

Beside her bed, I looked back on the nights shortly after she disappeared, when Pam would try to lure me out. But I would not go. Colors had become dull, her sweet scent seeming to permeate my senses at every moment, the finest blood tasting plain in comparison to hers. She was a ghost haunting me every time the sun sunk down.

At night I'd sit in my office and go through the motions of being Sheriff and bar owner, but afterwards I would dream. My fantasies were no longer of me and her in bed. They were of me and her together, just sitting near each other. Sometimes we would talk, sometimes not. Sometimes we were bathed in sunlight, laughing; other times we were under the cloak of night, telling each other about our lives. They were my connection to her, my only connection to sanity sometimes...yet they were the bane of my existence. For over a year, I only saw her in my mind. But no matter how badly I tried, I could not touch her. I would come back to myself and wonder if that was how she would always be: untouchable, out of reach. I was driven by my need to feel her skin.

"A thousand years on this earth behind me, and eternity ahead of me...but I would give up forever to touch you," I told her once. She just laughed and told me that this wasn't real. In my head I thought that maybe if I touched her, the real her would feel it. She'd come back to me.

But here I was, twelve and a half months after she left. She was back, sleeping in the house that was technically mine, unaware of my presence...and I still couldn't bring myself to touch her. I was scared that this was another vision, another fantasy my mind had cruelly conjured up. I couldn't leave though, even if I wanted to. I needed to be near her, the light that had come into my life for such a short time. I needed to smell her, see her, hear her. I needed to breathe in this moment so I would never forget. In a few short hours she would wake up and be busy with her life. I would only be a passing thought. But for right now, I could almost trick myself into thinking that she had returned to me, had returned for me. I could almost trick myself into thinking that she was mine. Because after the past year of my life, I sure as hell knew I was hers.

**Inspired by "Iris" by Goo Goo Dolls