Have you ever heard a song
So sweet that lyrics would corrupt it?
So pure that you hold your breath
Afraid you'll shatter it just by sighing?
It's a torn feeling, an unnameable feeling, the description of which can only lead you in circles
Hopelessly tangled in the desire to express it.
It is something so excruciatingly, frustratingly ineffable that you can't even move, frozen in awe, locked in a complex, pressurised longing.
Something
So achingly lovely that just the thought of it
Pulls tears from you in diamond threads
And makes you, briefly, a shimmering echo of it,
Lit
From inside.
I say this
Even though I know that trying to describe that feeling
Is like trying to grasp at mist
I say this
I say it because
I felt like that in your arms.
I looked at you
In the half-light
And just for a second I saw you fully, in a new way.
The light loved you.
It slid along your skin like it came from the stars
And not from a bedside lamp propped against the wall.
You were so smooth, so soft, tendrils of hair escaping their pinnings and following the long lines of your neck.
Your eyes gleamed through your smile,
And all the sweetness and wit and beauty behind them,
All of that that I could touch, all that art looking at me in that moment, like having a symphony play for just you,
That soul under that skin, a whole galaxy of loves and hates and dreams and insecurities coursing through you...
And me
An inch away
Less
Pressed up against you like a parallel universe, so near and so sacred and so shockingly tangible-
The heat of you, so solid but so pliable next to me, so much a part of me that nothing about me could feel empty.
I couldn't breathe for joy, suddenly.
You could have been the moon, just then,
Or a goddess, like one of those smooth, white, subtly glowing statues in the museum halls,
Women I always imagined came alive at night and basked in the starlight,
Absorbing it to throw it back upon the world when day broke.
Your fingertips on me traced patterns
And I wanted them to touch me deeper
Wished my body was more my soul than flesh can be
So that I could feel yours in your hands.
It was too much!
It was
Not enough.
And I laughed, hid my face in your neck, felt your pulse there and how fragile your collarbones were.
I wanted to seep into your skin like rain.
I tried to shrug past it
But the feeling grabbed me by the shoulders and shook the words out of me,
And suddenly I was cheek to cheek with you,
Confessing...
After that the way I touched you changed.
I don't know if you felt it,
But I did.
It had been coming, sneaking up on me, all that day.
In my arms, beneath my palms, I held something so unutterably precious
Whenever I held you
And I knew it fully then, unable to unfeel it.
It made me tender in a way that pierced my heart
In a way that scared me
Because it felt like why I'm here.
If someday I get to tell you I love you
I will tell you that it was that moment when I knew for sure I would.
That moment when it all became so crushingly, beautifully real to me-
When gravity shifted, and you began to pull me instead.