You are fifteen the first time someone says your name like it is made of electricity. He is made of sunlight, the kind that you wake up feeling on your skin and the kind of voice you still hear ringing like your favorite song in your head even after you hang up the phone.
You love him simply because he is real.
When you talk to him, you no longer feel compelled to think with your brain. Rather, it is the monotonous thump within the cavern walls of your chest that does the thinking for you.
When he says your name like a contagion he is desperate to catch, it skips. The spaces between the beats become less and less defines, both snare drum hearts pounding in unison for each other. Nothing else exists except for him and those hypnotic eyes, like footprints he leaves behind on the surface of your soul.
Your lips meet under the luminescence of the Big Dipper above, beneath the radiance of the same stars you used to curse before you met him. You recall the moment you had given up at the irrational idea of love, shaking your fists at God, screaming questions that only time could possibly answer. The days when the only thing reverberating against your lips was a collection of absence and everything left unsaid. But those days are over, and now he looks at you- gazes into your eyes like had found what he had spent seventeen years unknowingly searching for.
You can't help a smile from blossoming across your face because your heart, though it thinks, over analyzes, now it understands. He is your serendipity, a piece of heaven revealed to you at the least expected time. When all you wanted to do was destroy your fragile skin with the remnants of what could have been, he became your guardian angel. One that pulled you from the wrath and toil of your deepest afflictions and whispered, “You are safe. You are home.”