You must have known.
That day I held your hand and you held my gaze
And the air was thick with smoke and unspoken words and tiresome clichés.
Your eyes crinkled softly like they always do.
Always, always in the pretentious books I would pour over for hours as I try to envision myself right there,
Comforting myself with the idea that someone, one day, will dance with me to the sound of nothing but two hearts beating in unison.
There is something desperately intimate about oxygenation.
Always in these silly, profound books, they describe their darling’s eyes with every hue known to man.
Deep, aquamarine, sparkling crystal orbs that you would be so happy to drown in.
Entrancing and stormy forests.
Pools of warm honey with gold flecks in them, sweet as dandelion wine.
I will not condescend to compare your eyes to saccharine.
Or bodies of water, for that matter, or trees.
I will not waste time equalizing them to shades of the rainbow.
What are eyes, really,
Other than a means to see?
All that is beautiful and all that is clean.
I hold my own eyes in higher esteem than yours, dear,
Because they allow me to revel in the way yours light up when you smile.
How the skin underneath creases and wrinkles in all the most endearing ways
Like the infinite pages of a book in some foreign language
That only I can understand.
The ability to do so is a prerogative of the infatuated.
I wonder if you’ll let me read this book more often now that we’re here, two forgotten souls grinning stupidly at each other in the dark.
You must have known, then, that I would spend every day of the rest of my life reading this book if you only allowed me to do so.
Embedded in my mind was the way the corners of your mouth shot up towards the heavens.
I did not have to trace it to know that it was there.
You must have known.
There was not a crumb of my being you did not hold in the callused palm of your hand.
All of the streetlights were doused by the blanket of the night and it was truly not a movie-worthy moment because there were no stars and the moon was out of sight and there were stray cats padding around in the neglected garbage dumpster and I could not even remember why we were laughing so hard and I loved you.
Unequivocally.
