On Him:
I can’t be sure when I quit letting myself imagine a passion I could melt into. When did I close the door on being held and happy, safely tucked within the embrace of unconditional love?
I’ve paced the halls of the same dimly lit hospital night after restless night, for more than a decade. We watch for impending disasters, the shadow of Death at the threshold of patient rooms, tossing wilted flowers with the same hands that zipped the body bag.
Blacks, greys, blurry, nameless faces I always struggled to recall.
Until him.
How cliche.
I saw him and my soul sighed.
“I found him.”
“The pan is hot,” my grandpa would say, “don’t touch it.” But still, I reached towards the danger, foolish bravado and skepticism my defining character trait even at 8 years old.
I never learned how to turn down the heat without plugging the gas line.
Somehow he remains unaware of the intensity and volume of my emotions. 39 years of trying to keep the pan cold enough to touch; can I really be blamed if the ignition lit up whole cities?
“I daydream…” he says to me.
I chew on my tongue to keep the words wedged between my jaws. “Of slow and sleepy sundays curled into each other? Drinking coffee I brewed after my morning run, and you’re reading books about languages I can’t even pronounce and I’m struggling with the crossword again, until you mumble the word I’ve been searching for?”
“What if…” his question drifts on a breath that traces the contours of my cheek and sends electricity through every nerve along my trembling body.
“If we spend the rest of forever together going on adventures and seeing the sun rise in every country and sip slowly this rich, thick love we’ve waited our whole lives for?”
I am fire.
He is water.
Oh, how he flows and persists and wears gullies into the stone surfaces of my heart. How he magnifies my light and picks apart my colors and the world can see this beautiful thing I am becoming in the wake of him.
If he knew?
He would run.
That’s what I tell myself.
I am combustible.
Impulsive. Explosive. All or nothing.
If he gets too close, if I let him touch the flames, he will disappear.
Vapor in the air around me.
(Tasting him on my tongue with each breath for eternity is better than never having felt him drip down my fingertips.)
He’s soaked into my skin and I struggle and churn, an inferno licking the walls of an iron cage I built to keep myself from burning those around me.
I push, I push, I push, I turn to run.
But he floods me and I cannot swim and he is (impossibly) every breath I draw, (impossibly) the salt filling my mouth, and (impossibly) a life raft I can’t stop reaching for.
Where I stomp, he tiptoes
His whispers force my monsoon moods into placidity.
I’ve never been interested enough to command silence from the skies just to hear any man’s murmurs.
Until him.
How cliche.
I burn too brightly, men have told me.
Scolding me for scalding their hesitant grasp.
He smiles and my flames, once white hot, cool to orange and with ease I’m wrapped in his arms once more.
But I’m a monster and I’m all teeth and I’m trying to bite him but he…
He is a breeze ruffling my hair and I seem to have forgotten what raised my hackles to begin with.
“I think about it sometimes…” the musings of this man leave me unraveled.
Silently finishing his sentences, “About sitting beside me on some bistro balcony, staring at the misty pacific coast while the tide comes in? I’ll pretend to steal a bite of your pastry and you’ll pretend to admonish me and the laughs that escape come from somewhere deep and primal, unlocked within these moments where discovering the world together has brought us to life?”
You see
I speak in metaphors.
And he is succinct.
I am meandering.
He is straight lines.
But what I’ve become in the rubble of loving him without abandon has no name in any earthly language.
“Don’t touch that.”
My grandfathers words.
“You’ll get burned.”
I brace for the searing, I flinch at each touch
Never expected, never predicted
Him.
How cliche.
He is the rain and I was a forest fire.
“…I can’t give you more than this.”
We crash into one another and he extinguishes what I’ve worked so hard to keep safe. My craving for destruction and consumption fizzles and hisses until all that is left of me is
Tendrils of smoke
Curling and dancing as I dissipate into the atmosphere
As if I never existed at all
What if, I think about it sometimes, I daydream
It’s me he tastes in the air around him, long after I am gone.
How cliche.