and if I could bottle the look on his face, I'd keep it by my bedside for the rest of my life

And then there you were, all over my dreams last night. Or maybe it was already morning. It wasn’t comfortable, and I found that I kept surfacing into semi-consciousness, to get away, to breathe. But I kept diving back in, too, because I wanted to understand. Why were you there? Why were you ever there? What kind of spell did you cast over me so that I let you back into my heart?

I remember one time, when I was overseas, you sent me a book. A really expensive one. It was a sweet and generous gesture, and still, there was something about it. Something of you that rubbed off on the packaging somehow. My eyes lit up when I opened it and then when I touched it, curiously, my heart went dark. I think I knew then, but couldn’t reconcile my intuition with what I wanted to believe, so I just closed the door on those shadowy thoughts and thrust myself forward into the too bright fluorescence. 

It wasn’t all that long afterwards that you told me “it’s not quite a relationship, but it’s not far from it.” You thought I would understand. You expected me to wait. Again. You tried to tell me that I hadn’t loved you the right way, because I was honest about how much of my heart was already wrapped around somebody else when you convinced me to crack the door back open. 

I realized, at some point, that you never really knew me. That you liked my story, or at least the cherry-picked parts of it that caught your attention. You had no idea how deep my valleys cut into the earth. No concept of the strength and flexibility of my branches. No words to describe the magic in my eyes. 

I was born on a stormy day amidst stormy emotions. I was raised on two legs in two homes that might as well have been two planets. I grew healthy in the structure of one and strong in the chaos of the other. I have always straddled the in between. Living fiercely in the now. Steadily laying bricks for the tomorrows.