There are certain events in every life that happen with stunning destiny. Lovers meeting, for instance—two strangers laughing over spilled drinks in a bar somewhere in rural Greece. A book with a forgotten twenty dollar bill tucked in its pages tumbling off the shelf and falling open at a patron’s feet. The initial eye contact between a boy and the child who will eventually become his best friend.

Falling in love with you.

I never stood a ******* chance. There was always something there, wasn’t there? From the very first moment all the way to now, a duality, circling one another endlessly. I have loved you terribly, awfully, for so long. For far longer than you or I knew. Perhaps even always.

This is the story of that night. That Night. The night I realized. I’ll do my best to take you there, back to you, lightning, me, struck, but no words will ever be adequate.

                                                     …

The night I fall in with you I have no idea what is about to happen.

I have no idea of the long months to come, or how determinedly I will train myself to dismiss the glow you ignite in my stomach, or all the times I will type I love you into the bright emptiness of an email message box, only to punch backspace with a bitter sense of failure, or how I will sit in darkness on another night, a night currently in the unfathomable future, thinking that you don’t love me back and never will, aching like the Earth must have ached when its surface split into pieces, fissure-hearted and dazed.

I am in the path of a swiftly approaching avalanche, but I have no idea of any of this.

The night I fall in love with you I am young and the stars are out and you are at the door. The night I fall in love with you my heart is beating like a wild deer’s and you are in front of me. Leaning against the door frame. Smiling a little.

Oh, if hearts could speak. If they had mouths of their own, if they could voice the truths boiling within us. If they could say this is what I want. If hearts could stand up and say I love you so much it feels as if I am dying then that is what mine would have said, unstoppably. Because if my heart had had the ability to roar just then, it would have declared its infinite adoration for you and demanded the same in return. It would have said I’m keeping a place inside me warm for you, I promise you. The lamp is lit, the door unlocked. I am ready for your entrance, dear, and I always will be.

But this is not a story about declarations, because the night this happens I am young and shocked and burning, and my heart has not learned how to speak.

                                                         …

It goes like this.

You are at the door and I am falling in love with you.

No, that’s wrong. I’m clearly already in love with you and must have been for a while, but it’s finally falling together. The pieces of you are settling into my psyche like mosaic fragments of the most of extraordinary sort. You’re saying something, probably hello, but I’m not hearing you. All I’m thinking of is you and your eyes and your way of treating me as if I am someone more deserving than I really am, you and you and you and you. Your hands and your laughter and your beauty, tendons and muscle, bones and ligaments, veins and blood, blood running under your skin and mine.

There are other people there, but they don’t matter. Just you. I want to melt in your arms, your hands, your voice. I want to be rebuilt and reborn, transformed into something proud and lovely, something that is you and I together. I know then that I am ******, utterly, that I would carry you to the ends of the earth.

That just standing beside you is heaven.  

                                                      …

Behind you the night sky is sweeping coal, but there’s so much brilliance radiating from you that there is no place to hide, no place to bury my breathlessness. I cannot escape your light. The night is cool as ice, but you are warm and my heart is leaping out of my chest, jumping toward you like a worshipful beast, red and rough and bursting.

One day it will reach its destination, but not yet. It’s the moment I fall in love with you. It’s now, and the night is deep and soft.

You and I are together, and between us there’s a shivering bond nothing can ever extinguish, not even the end of the universe. Because even if we weren’t together we would still be thinking the same thoughts, sharing the same observations, arcing in the same trajectory.  The sheer certainty of this makes my head spin. It is in this instant that I know if hearts could shout, mine would say us and always.

I’d like to tell my heart about the future. Whisper things like she’ll love you too and it’s going to happen and when it does it will be so electrifying that the wait will be worth it; when it does it will release parts of you no one knew existed and you will not feel like a criminal anymore for wanting her and when it does it will be miraculous.

But it doesn’t know about the wait or the want or the worry, or the day it is finally brave enough to sing its love, putting us together, finally, as we must be.

Not yet.

All it knows is tonight.

​I said you are
the purple veins of an orchid
quickening footsteps
mist clinging to pines
the dip in the waltz
a geode cleaved in two
tunnels thrumming their pulse
hitched breath
lungfuls of winter wind
the dusty burn of smoke two streets over
an invasion of fireflies
fields with moonlight beating down
pollen-ridden light

I said you are
picnics caught in the rain
and petals in the hair
stones glistening at low tide
and Vivaldi
sound waves from outer space
and ink smeared palms
a warm shoulder in the dark
and the snap of a wind-ruffled sail
heart pounding
and movement


I said you are
crystalline
rooted yet rootless
atomic, ultraviolet,
ineffable

Sooner or later I'll have
to face the fact that
I'm not really good at anything
Yes, I dabble in writing
[the art of fashioning
buzzing thoughts into something
vaguely meaningful] and oh, I can make
the piano shout truths to the world
by hammering its keys and feeling
every palpitating sliver of love
and grief burst from my
callused fingertips
And yes, I can sneak candid
photographs of strangers laughing
or walking or dropping
their crumpled cellophane wrappers
into the street when they think
no one is watching
And here and there
I dance, twisting my
spine into contortions of human expression
wrestling with gravity until
my muscles spasm
and give out
flirting with the edges of my
endurance until I can't take it any more
and I go down,
gasping
But contrary to some people's
beliefs, this is not talent or skill
This is not mastery or ability
This is me stripping myself
down to the very essence of
my character
tearing the insecurities away like
an old Band-Aid
shoving my ugly fears into the light
before they can get the better of me
This is not vision or genius
This is a gloriously chaotic mess
of swirling thoughts and feelings
turned into something tangible
This is not art
This is just me playing with the raw
exhilaration
of being alive

you have entered the realm of life after separation.
gone are the daisies she tucked behind your ears. it’s autumn now.
you are getting older. your boots are heavy and your chest is heavier.
you were given something gleaming, but it isn’t yours,
anymore. you seethe in your own ache.
this is your first silver october. the blushing leaves have gone greyscale,
like an i love lucy rerun. they evoke a stab of grief between your lungs.
you have to rewrite the story of your life now,
go forward knowing that everything after will be somehow
lesser than her. no person will reach into you the way she did.
you are a lost girl. resignation is all you have left,
resignation and streets bitter with dead leaves, streets where you run and shout
a silent prayer of loss.

but then:
but then.

you are reciting a poem for a room of people and your words
belong to your body now. a deep glow has fallen over everything,
right onto a girl you’ve only seen once before.
front row. face open. taking in what you are saying,
your retrospective sorrow, with a particular kind of attentiveness
you have needed all along.
everyone is listening, but she is hearing you.
in that moment, when you are raw and earnest,
you think that perhaps there’s something different about
this one. how even when you are done, she still seems to be
hearing all the words you cannot say.

and then:
and then.

spring is thrusting its way out of cold dirt
and you are twisting and breathing and this girl,
this girl, she is one million ******* shades of red. all you can do is
look at her without turning away, as if you could do such a thing
even if you tried. maybe this is how rembrandt felt
when painting night watch.
full of thick, rich burning too immense for language to hold.
this girl, this girl in the midst of life after. this girl so good
she’s put meaning back into the messy coming of spring.

you have learned not to trust. not to believe.
to love with a window open, a hand on the door,
in case of incineration, ready to run.
but this girl, says your heart,
says the peachy light bleeding onto her lips and nose,
this girl is not like those who came before her.
you’ve been a stranger to yourself for so long, but this girl
is reintroducing the two of you, rubbing you raw with longing.
do you understand, you want to say to her,
how stunning you are.
standing there like that. in your sincerity and laughter, as it weren’t
breath snatching to witness. as if it were commonplace,
unexceptional. as if you weren’t the tenderest work of art.

do you.

Perhaps an introduction is in order.

We are fields of graves, bone-dust lying soft beneath the earth, footnotes in the annals of history. We are housewives, warriors, mothers, witches, healers, poets, inventors, philosophers, seekers, servants, royalty. We are young and old and middle-aged. We are the line of relentless faces in front of The White House lawn, the chaffed, frozen fingers gripping banners of purple and gold. We are wombs that hemorrhaged from the unforgiving wire of coat hangers. We are the tender and unbreakable who raised generations under the weight of our ***.  

We are legend. We are life-source. We are women.

In any case, we have something to tell you, our daughters, who are so defeated you can barely find a reason to go on. Listen.

You come from the guts of the Universe and are equipped with more power than our society knows what to do with. From cradle to coffin, you face a world which tries to snap you in two at every chance. You are branded with labels as soon as you’re old enough to attract attention. You are *****, ****, *****, ****; weak, silly, inferior, dim, useless. You are good for your body and if your body is not good enough—if your hips are too wide for **** and your ******* too small for beautiful and your hair to rough to be desirable—you aren’t worth anything.

Each time you turn on the television or computer or step outside your home, you are assaulted by what you should be, told to go to war with your sense of self. You’re something always in need of fixing and this only intensifies with time. You are naturally unclean, too wild for your own good. Men won’t touch you unless you are smooth, supple, and hairless—practically childlike. They shudder at any mention of the monthly blood flow between your legs and the way your abdomen clenches and aches, proof that you can create life.

Your most base rights and liberties are still (God, still) the source of violent political warfare, because Human does not apply to Female. You are ***** in billions of ways, stripped and stripped of your dignity, your power, and those sweet stars in your eyes. You stand in the center of a great mob, and their spears are all pointing at you.

We burn for you, are enraged to the point of combustion. We’ll never forget what it was like to be in your place. The memory of such oppression will always be imprinted within us, reverberating long after death. Our softest, deepest apologies are with you, as is our softest, deepest admiration. We hope you can feel it.

We hope you’ll put down your despair for a moment, listen to your heart drumming away, and remind yourself that your subordinance is man-made. You are crafted of the same atoms as Eve and Joan of Arc and Cleopatra, your strength is infinite. You are pure helium, rising, reviving and resurrecting, again and again, on and on.

Lift your chin, raise your eyes, and breathe from the root of your being. Don’t be frightened; we are with you. The fight goes on.