In my next life, I want to be sunlight so I can rest on your skin each morning and throughout the afternoon. I can long for you without rest in the midst of a thunderstorm. This feeling, it’s difficult to explain. Most of it is unspoken, but I’ll try to explain it on paper.

Each day, I want to be the softest thing you taste. After a long day at work, your touch anywhere on my frame will ******* undone like almond flowers.

Some days I feel as though I am going mad. I stare blankly at my computer screen and think, What good are my hands if you aren’t in them?  It’s all quite troubling and often keeps me from getting anything done at all. Even when I am getting things done, somehow, you are ever present, ever flowing from my fingertips.

There is something about drinking coffee with you that is simply thrilling. The way you purse your lips and smile, I unfold in your direction. Perhaps, this is the love that they’ve all been talking about. All of those songs I’ve listened to, books I’ve read; perhaps they have all led me to this point, to this place with you. How dare I presume that I’ve been so lucky?

Surely, this will turn south and we will be nothing more but old stories and photographs; but tonight we are in love. Tonight, we are daring, we are unarmed and tonight, this is enough.

We are destined to arrive at our graves alone so why is it that we pursue companionship so furiously with someone who will arrive at a different time? We anxiously dive into this realm of uncharted territory, hoping to find someone who will fill in our timeline with love and fancy. What I have come to learn over the years is that love is a savage and merciless emotion, a creature unyielding and untamed, yet we still chase it relentlessly.
Why?
It’s just what we do. Among all feelings, love can give you wings and revive the dead broken parts of yourself that you once thought were irreputable. Love can set your life into bloom. Love feels like spring. Sometimes. Other times though, love is malicious and malignant but we say, No, love only means well, Love has the best intentions, but is this true?
Let’s say that perhaps Love does mean well and is truly trying very hard to devise us each with a kindred spirit to bring us unbounded warmth and pleasure. However, Love is not perfect and will often miss a step or forget the formula. Love will forget to call or remarry only 6 months after the divorce.
But do we blame Love for this? How can we?
It is the most compelling passion that is granted to the human race. The one thing that can soften the savage beast. In a world full of temporary things, Love is a perpetual feeling. Love keeps us constant and alive like a compass in the dark wood.
So, as this fleeting moment that we call life presses by, we sit next to the pretty girls in class and dance with the man at your best friend’s wedding because Love is infinite. It is a relentless thirst that we will try to quench, always. It is the one thing that neither god nor any force on earth could steal from us. A right embedded into our very souls, carved into the stone walls of our minds. We will do the impossible for love.
It wires us, makes us feel safe, makes us feel crazy, makes us feel everything all at once. We would die for it. We would **** for it. Love has no limits. It is the one thing that we can take with us when we are buried. I do not know what happens when we pass over, but I take great comfort in knowing that someone will come to visit my bones and tend my flowers even after I have gone.
That is why we dive.

And then the strangest thing happened...I leaned in, close enough to exchange breaths and then I kissed her. It was a taste I’d never known before. Strawberries, cigarettes and cheap wine were suddenly a sample of honeyed lilac. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop. It was as if energy was pulsing through us, like we were generating the power to the whole city. It was soft and vicious at the same time. It was electric. My hands explored the back of her neck and she reached her hands into my hair, pulling into each other. We are magnetic. Finally, we stopped and looked at one another. A look so bold and revered and then everything came into focus and she let out a small sigh. I hadn’t noticed up until now that she had a freckle under the right corner of her eye. And then she smiled. God, isn’t that a sight, I thought to myself. So what do you do after a moment like this? What anyone in their right mind would do, of course. I asked her to dance.

I must remind myself that the times have been much worse before. I have seen darker days and I have touched light in the purest form. I know that we are amongst bad decisions and unlucky circumstances but we are not hopeless. We are never hopeless. We are relentless in our fight through humanity. We dance with illusion and flirt with temptation. Our hands are callused with fear and we continue to hammer away at these dreams, trying to bury them because we are too afraid to make them into the skyscrapers they ought to be. But no matter, things could be much worse. I am thankful for the air pumping through my lungs and the blood running live a river in my veins. I know that there is still a path, but I’m going to have to pave it myself. This is what instills the most fright within me. I often make wrong turns when I am given directions and now I have no destination in mind. I am just trying to have better days. I must remind myself that we are not hopeless. We are never hopeless.

And that’s just the thing, now isn’t it? I’m not lonely because I don’t have you. I don’t have a you. There is no one that makes my heartbeat accelerate. My dreams are filled with strangers I pass each day because I have no real place to land.
Do you understand how frustrating it is to have no one to daydream about? To be completely and utterly free of love and pain. I’ll tell you. It’s quite miserable and it feels endless. A person looking for love is in much more danger than those who have already found it, whether it be requited or not. We are dancing in the rain, hoping to drown because at least that gives us a chance to be enveloped in something. We throw ourselves into exciting situations and chairs of coffeehouses in hopes that someone will look and say, I think I ought to go say something, and yet no one ever does. It makes me start thinking of my past lovers. Suddenly I’m on the verge of calling them just to see what their day is like. I feel like I’ve lost my mind. It’s like my life is being portrayed through a lens where all I can see is all of the people who are in love around me.
I often have dreams that I am being chased and I approach an end to the road. The cliff is steep and I have no map to safer ground, but I can’t jump. I don’t. Because I remember, I am not being chased at all. Everything feels very confusing. There are no borders, there are no lines to trace. I am freehanding my life, unrehearsed and unprepared. How do you give directions to an unknown place? That seems to be the question I have placed before me.

On days like today, I am the sky. You are sitting on an old stool in the kitchen. Clad in blue pajamas, burnt caramel hair hanging over your eyes. You are reading a book, it is old and yellow. I find myself building a treehouse for us in my mind. You are a poet’s death of choice. Your fingers slide gently down the side of the page as you turn it, glancing over at me. You let out a sigh and give me a small smile. This is my garden song. This is my first right. My Sunday morning. I think I loved you before I knew how. Some people, they are artists and some people are art and my god, darling, you are both. I want to read the poems you write when you think God isn’t watching. Let’s make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms and wake up just to make love again. Take me to your favorite museum. Show me how gentle you can be. When you are at a loss of words, kiss me and I will spill a new language into your mouth. I will kiss you in places you never knew existed. I touch the parts of you that have been kept behind a curtain. This is my garden song and today, I am the sky. Tomorrow, we will bloom under the September rain and and slowly dig each other’s graves.

The truth is that no one will ever be able to truly understand you. You are a carefully sculpted stone, an exterior complex and individual to their personal thrashing and erosion. A painting entertained by change and chance. You are unlike any other, don’t you see? In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.