She'll smell like summer.
And you, you'll smell like smoke
you filthy bastard, but that doesn't matter,
because she smokes too—she just
magically smells like summer when she does,
and you’ll know.

It’s in the way that her hands grasp at yours,
how she is soft in all the ways
you never imagined another human being could be,
how she feels luminous and lonely,
the way the stars must feel to the Earth—
trust me, you'll know.
  
There will be nights in her arms where
you'll find yourself wondering if
you could slit the wrists of time,
just to stay with her that much longer,
knowing that you would put a bullet
in the face of every clock
if it would make a goddamn difference,
you'd stop the Earth's rotation if you could.

But, you can’t.

So instead, you'll hold her,
and spin counter-clockwise,
trying to fight the inertia of orbits,
certain that every infinitely small
fraction of a second you'll gain
will make all the dizziness worthwhile.
You could never imagine regretting it.
When you kiss, you will learn how the soil loves the rain
by the way she feels so necessary against you.
You will spend hours, tracing her with your fingertips
as though she were a bible composed entirely in Braille, begging you to read.
Just trust me, you’ll know.

And when it ends, you’ll be left trying
to reconstruct her hands
from everything she ever gave you.
You'll try to trace her voice in ink,
knowing it's impossible,
but still praying there's a way you can hold
her in a metaphor, certain that
if you could, you would never stop writing her.
And you'll find rebounds,
because it turns out a lot of us are lonely like the stars,
but you’ll still kiss,
feeling every inch of her absence
in the way your bodies don't quite fit together,
a new distance between your bones
whenever you laugh too hard at another girl’s jokes.

And when you finally see her again
you will hurt in ways you never imagined possible,
but you will remember how
you held eternity in your hands when
she lay under your palms.
How after a lifetime of uncertainty,
she was the first thing that made sense

and you’ll say to yourself
“Goddamn. She was worth it.”