Something about his small sharp eyes, the way he throws his head back and laughs a deep belly laugh. Just out of delight. Makes me want to dig into him. Excavate. The sky could be purple outside and I wouldn't see it if I walked out under it. My focus lies pinpointed, in him, whether it's favorable, charmed or unsure. Yet this is not a love story. He entices me, catches a corner as I pull away, longing. I know this game, and I'll pull away further. After maybe just one night.

The sky it turns out, the color it turns as day fades and sets, light skewed through atmosphere to create my spectacle, is the connection I can't sacrifice. I have before, gone for months on end, unable to see the stars, forgetting entirely that they were there, on our ceiling that is, not just transposed onto his body, constellations of freckles as my north star. Unable to feel the grass beneath my bare feet, fingers hungrily running instead through hair, my seasons ebbed and flowed between haircuts and postures, the sun setting as I mourned his momentary losses: leaving for work as I went to hibernate, fall asleep quickly and the sooner you'll wake.

I forgot entirely the majesty of a darkened sky. How, out underneath it, walking alone, how bright it actually is still. I've walked before at night, picking out shapes, navigating perfectly and fully embraced alone in that vaccuous womb, my trust realigning, expanding, wiggle-room forged between my subsets, the value to hold it all in place collapsing sweetly, and thinking "is it really in fact night? Where is this light coming from? Who, now, is illuminating my path?"

I'll never again return indoors or flick on an artificial light, squinting over text obscured by barriers when it's provided for, and in such abundance, just two feet away, just one window pane's separation. I might dream of you, but I can't return. You must understand, you hold yourself elsewhere, too deeply hidden, that to conjoin, I'd have to journey inwards and forego the changing sky I've become so attached to. And which asks for nothing in return. No door can be closed in my face, no corridors blocked from my view and footprints where there is no plaster and frames.

My home, where things make the only sense to me, is in the expanse. This I can navigate, here I can see where abandoned bones go and how roots grow. This I can navigate. But I will come in if you invite me. For a night. Because warmth, even from a furnace, still heats my skin.

This cycle ends, as others do, as a welcome respite and a clean slate. My chalice tips and spills its wine, a reminder to let down the weights loosen my grip and loosen my tights. To lose hold of the responsibility to uphold life. This I can witness, these cycles I can witness not as deaths and births, losses and burdens but as cycles, a mere rotation. And far from the last or the only, although a different meaning can be derived from saturation, a subsuming more tangible, so a pruning of the fingers can be seen and felt more clearly. Diving into a pool that can be dried to echo a pool larger it's easier to forget. This cycle ends, as the others do, to expose itself as just that. A reminder that I can partake without generating, live exist and feel without producing, speaking and creating. My contribution is irrevocable. In my anatomy and my potential is the sole purpose to create, at some point to say something, inevitable day light allowing me to bask and languish in the dark. Expand, exhale. And drain.

Saudade

Midnight. Two hours ago is when I planned to go to sleep. My heart is pounding though and keeping me from it. From sugar. Two pieces of left over birthday cake. But for romance's sake we can leave that out maybe. Ah romance. Something I've lost a good deal of. I'm rebounding. I've dipped so heavily into that pool and have retracted so far from it. But in both extremes, I lose myself. My balance of encompassing them both.

It's funny- I often read over past writings of mine and think- Fuck, that was so good! That's so clearly expressed and pure. And what I've gotten since then is a good beating. A good dose of reality and experience that has eroded my rough edges smooth. And who has time for poetry and words to play with then there's a car to register and rent to pay and an article to write?

My mind hops around frantically- looking for something that will catch its attention. My attention so unrooted and free-floating. Reeling in outer space after having detached from the gravitational field of my love. Funny that term, "my love". The love being truly mine. And how true. Thinking back, hearing his voice or reading something he wrote to me, he is objectively unremarkable. And certainly embodies very few of the qualities that I would list as being things I seek out. Values we share. Yet, with all of my heart, I adored him. Maybe just because he let me and so few do. And that feeling- that- that is a feeling unlike any other.

For every electron in my body, normally stretching and pulling me in multiple directions at once, to stop. Align. And all move together in one. I had found direction, a purpose, and it took me off into the woods on a path I didn't expect. And ran me eventually into a brick wall over and over again until, through sheer will, I stepped back, looked up at the stars and wandered off into the darkness in hope of once again finding light.

I want something. So badly I yearn, I long, I grieve for something. But I have no idea what. Finding a treasure trove, I'm convinced, in which one is stocked with enough mystery to last a lifetime. Little pockets of unknown that can be unwrapped and discovered, a source to which any yearning can be attributed and thought to be tangible, is the key. To delude oneself, to mask oneself in a dillusion so grand and beautiful that incompletion becomes romance and failure becomes an art. A world in which every stroke plays into a picture, messy up close but grand from far away. That's the picture I want to paint. The bridge I want to look at.

In the face of the massive expanse of this crazy crazy world, every longing looks silly and every concern and excitement, insignificant and petty. So, in the name of beauty, in the name of romance, for god's sake, make your world a litte smaller. Put blinders on yoursef so, like a horse, you can rule out fear and keep onward.

The biggest heartbreak, the biggest source of emptiness and frustration, is not knowing what to long for. The longing will always be there. My longing however has no direction. I'm turning in circles trying to find a worthy cause, a green light, disoriented without it. Installing tangibles just to give myself a north star. Reeling and wallowing in my completion, desiring desire itself.

Here's the bottom line. You find meaning, everyone does, I certainly do, through love. Through lov-ing, the act of it. So never, at any turn, deprive yourself.

Time Bomb

I remember the first week we spent together. You dropped me off back at my house after and I remember walking up the stairs, returning to something without you, after having found you, and I felt, walking away, very distincty feeling like the root system, the pulp, had been pulled out from my form, leaving just the shell. The marrow had been pulled from my bones.

When I met you, over that first week or two we spent together, all the pieces came together in a way that made sense to me. My world glowed with life, I could see the stars during the day and the sun shone at night. My life had found a meaning so unbelievaby fulfilling and so effortlessly simple.

I'm still not sure what happend. I melted is the best way I can describe it. I fell to pieces and fell apart. Something which I still haven't recovered from fully. I'm fragmented. I can't quite see the things around me, as if, without you, without my vision imbued with that love I found for you, things are no longer worth seeing.

The strange thing is that I don't miss you. I don't want to go back, I don't want to share a bed with you, I don't miss your kiss. Although I remember the fullness of it so distinctly. With such relinquish and devotion you kissed me- like you were handing your soul and your spirit and your purpose over to me. Houdini's kiss-passed key, you treated me to life over and over. And I wanted it. So badly. I wanted to make a life with you. I wanted to make life with you. And you handed it all over to me so readily. I guess I couldn't hold it. I wasn't strong enough. And I fell apart under the weight of it. Maybe I didn't know how heavy it would be. Exactly what I was giving you permission to do.

It was never a matter of love. My love was never a question. I loved and still do love, absolutely every piece of you. I loved you with a mix of utter and unconditional adoration, comfort, desire and completion. You had held all of my softest parts. You completed and supported parts of me that I didn't even know were there. You introduced me to a love I never knew was possible, one I had longed for and seen in the distance but didn't know it was possible to attain. To be fully engulfed in. To swim in for months on end.

And now returning alone, my darling, I never thought I would be returning alone. My sweetheart. That word even is indelibly connected to you. How could I call you anything but? And doing so- returning alone- is like coming back to a shadow world.

This is all right. It's all the best and it's good to be here now and here alone, to be coming back around and painting color again between the outlines. Our timebomb expired, leaving nothing to return to. Life just breaks your heart in these ways, lessons coming in such compelling wrapping, interlaced with such beauty. It's time to move forward, and I'm happy to do so. But it will take someone big, my sweetheart, to fill your lovely shoes.

A Thread Runs Through

I just talked to an old boyfriend. The first boy I can say I really loved. Being reminded and looking back, my god I was so open then. So available. Now I have thick crunchy walls. Scabbed up skin that even I have to fight through. Interactions with others are far from connection, they're about survival. Even those I'm close to. Although distance is relative and my close friends, as close as they've ever been, now feel far away. As my cravings grow, my need for skin against me and another mind besides mine makes anything outside my skin feel far away. I can't always heat this body alone. Sometimes, and more often lately, it takes two of us, both your blood and mine. Spoken like this, like flashes of a dream, it comes back to me- how it felt to be then. Only a few years ago. But that's now, in this darkness, safe and alone. When the sun rises and there's light to create shadows again, I lose that recognition and become again, a stranger to myself. I'm terrified- terrified- of having lost that person. Who was able to love so purely, so simply.

Yet today, I unexpectedly ran into a man I knew two years ago who made me act like a fool and beat the steering wheel while driving alone. And in some ways, in my desire for him, I am the same. At least a thread runs through.

And when I step out of the shower, I dry myself off every time in the same way that I always have. I dry my face, then my shoulders and arms, chest and stomach, then I toss my hair in front of me to dry my back, dry each leg as I step out of the shower and then wrap my hair in the towel. And I will always do that exactly. Because it works and I've never had to think about it. It's just the way I move.

Tapping into the Love Cloud

My stomach flutters and holds its breath. I'm desperately in love. And you're the pretty face to which I attribute all I want to see. We don't like it when we can't put a name or face to something which is so obviously there in every inch of ourselves. So I'll do so and limit my view of the abyss to within your presence.
My body rocks and throbs with love and lust and I attribute it to your hair and eyes and stupid smile. And giving it a name and face, I delude myself into thinking that by being next to you, by being inside of you, I'm there. I am fully in tune with everything that encircles my body and leaves me awestruck.

While actually, you're not the epitome of my desires. You're not the manifestation of my love. You're a boy- a great one at that with a beautiful mind and open palms- I've always loved big hands. But what I'm feeling is something so much bigger. Something that has been here and will last so much longer than this night- this month- however long our lives will last. And the next morning, I'll stare silently at the ceiling and listen to you breath with no words in mind. And I'll feel strangely unsatisfied- more disconnected from you than ever. I am, after all, completely alone.

Me and the wind and the mountains and the frost- that's what I've got and you're a beautiful facet of it all- with a lovely face and the kind of arms that swallow me and hide my face in your chest- it feels so good. Like I'm safe and I stop and just feel the warmth and I forget what shoes I'm wearing and- for just a second but that's enough- I forget what color my hair is.

But attributing my own ability to come face to face with a power this big, to you- is a little deluded. And attributing all of that power to something in you that draws me in- well that's a little demeaning don't you think? Don't you think that assuming the fluxes, the forces, that literally rock my core, are only the effects of this thing we may have and the warm rough sensation of your hand against my back, is not quite giving it the credit it deserves?

Or maybe it's just the packaging of the same damn thing that laces everything I touch but this one makes sense to me, speaks my language, glues everything together in a way that's palatable, and fits into my notches seamlessly, like this was meant to be, and maybe it was.

But when I say I love you- and believe me I do- what I mean is that I love the way that vertebrae get slowly, gradually bigger as they work their way down. I love the way that skin stretches over the collar bone to create that little indent right above the bone, like it was draped over a clothes line. You could almost fill that little indent with sugar or, in a rainfall, it would pool with water and stay there for a day or two after the clouds clear. And when I say I love you, what I mean is that I love the way a cut heals- how one day, a little thin stretch of skin will span the tiny slit where I knicked myself and tore the ties. And how healing a wound is always a little bit of a leap of faith. But it worked. And it worked last time which is the only reason I'm still here and you're still beside me.

But one day- that leap of faith may not work and the wound will grow wider and skin is no longer strong enough to hold back the cleaving and will instead give in and melt away, and slowly fall apart.

I just want to stand next to you. I just want you to revel with me. Because my two eyes aren't always enough to take all of this in. And I'm not always strong enough to let myself fall. I want your hand pressed against my back, to be eased down in your arms. I just need hands to catch me as I fall.