You told me you loved me amongst the crowd of a Steelers game while we were searching for a hot dog and soda. Not the most enchanting, but perhaps I watch too many rom-coms for my own good. I think I've always just romanticized each aspect of a relationship and all the major moments based on what media told me meant the most.

Opening my eyes now, those special moments aren't always at a candlelit dinner or by a fireplace, many times they are at a cookout with your friends or the zoo with my nieces and nephews. The beauty of feeling something so deeply that you just have to say it, even if it's in front of a porta ***** at a church festival or the stoplight on your way home, that's the real love that people feel.

So when I tell you I love you while sitting on my couch on a random Monday night, know that I mean it. Know that every muscle in my body wanted to tell you because I didn't wait for candlelight or an array of stars, instead I told you in the most real way, our way.

We will still have those romantic moments on a boat under the moonlight or the fireplace of an old house, but we will also have those passionate moments where we couldn't keep our feelings in anymore and the most appropriate place just happens to be a crowded train on the way downtown and an airport bar. I love you and I'll say it anywhere.



-t.s.

Between the two
is an eye
and the blue sky.

Still an unspoiled world
the butterfly
wings away.

The moonlit
starry sky
scrolls down the other eye!

A stormy night maybe dark
But it ends,
When the rays of sunshine
Pierce the clouds.
Dark days end with a moonlit night
When the pale moonlight
Turns sand into silver.
The starry night guides the sailors who are lost.
The bard may die
But his songs stay alive.

Coasting along the interstate the sun trickles down the horizon,
Bleeding into the land darkness casts its cloak on the land,
Moonlit fantasies decorate the skies as she shifts her gears to surge ahead,
Euphoria of the ride engulf her mind's eye - matching heaven's every stride,
An endless wanderer,
Lost in the journey's mayhem.

what if after all this time
i still want to slow dance in the dark?
with trembling fingers and pinching high heels.
to feel light behind my eyelids,
knowing it doesn't come from the outside,
but from within.
purple, rolling storm clouds.
stars on hardwood floors.
so let's dance in a moonlit room, darling.

In the fabric of time exists
moonlit seas of happenstance
and rose-scented memories
sewed in with golden beads
but it seems to me that life has found a way,
to sew in worn-out frayed threads,
that have lost their silky reflection

yet you,
with your resilient skin
found a way to make
embroidered mosaics of colour
out of the dissonance between good and bad