Alexander was the epitome of the color yellow.

When you looked at him, it’s all you could see. He was a sunflower, a star, the ray of sunshine on your floorboards on an early Spring morning. He was honey, and lemon, and daffodils. He was warm and soft and sweet. Lovely. Yellow.

He would bring you to the roof of his home, one of his several mansions all over the world, and sit with you beneath the night sky. “Look at the stars,” he would say. “Look how they shine for you.”

Alexander was like that. He dedicated the entire universe to you.

He would come home somedays from the studio in whatever country you’d both traveled to that week. “I wrote a song for you,” he would tell you. “And all the things you do.”

He would lie with you in the silken sheets of your bed, tracing hearts and stars and the Russian letters of his name into your skin. Under his touch, your skin and bones turn into something beautiful. He would laugh and hide his face in the crook of your neck, and call you gentle names in his native tongue. Then he would say: “You know I love you so.”

Back home in Russia. Alex takes your hand and a platter of your favorite snacks, and leads you up to the roof of your shared home. It’s three stories off the ground and, as you always have, you cling to Alex on the ascent. He sets your food down and the small cooler of drinks. A weekly picnic on the roof was the most divine thing you could have done together. That, or lying in his bed, or swinging in the rain on an abandoned park’s playground.

“Look at the stars,” he tells you, pointing a ringed finger towards the sky. “Look how they shine for you.”