The first thought is: It is me causing all the difficulty, with all the invisible walls between me and everyone else; I think this as I drink in your warmth, tight against your skin: my brain is a tornado formed between your drowsy voice expressing satisfaction with this brand of intimacy, and my earlier conclusions that there could be no room for this in the way we relate to one another: the way you have explicitly expressed a preference for. I fail to relax, because I can't rid myself of the impression that I must be trespassing, violating your wishes.
And I begin to suspect you never thought you were ruling out mornings like this one. That you perhaps have no idea that that is the ultimate consequence of the limitations and borders you've drawn up on our shared map. When you say "Only this, and not that", I do respect that.
But you, perhaps, aren't even aware that I am paying you this respect, because you would place this moment in a different spot on that map than where I have it marked down.
The second thought, when I'm on my way home, is - I always carry a winter with me, lurking just around the corner from any emotional forecast. It is there, always, and I don't believe I've either invited it or tried to reject it: it is there as much as my heartbeat and the automatic motion of my eyelids. It is always there the same way you can feel the imminent frost at the end of October; you accept its existence, even though it doesn't exist right at that moment.
And I employ my winter pragmatically; I let it freeze me over before I start to rot, I let it put certain desires and impulses to sleep when they are struggling to find nutrition in the landscape my heart provides.
The third thought is: I used the word heart, so while this is a useful model, I cannot employ it.