all my stars aligned

aquamarine:

so soon i will be on my way to you. the feeling of being scattered is one we are both familiar with. never truly -home-. but today i learned that one can make a home with people that screan safety. home is something we carry.

you scream safety.

can't wait to come home.

love,

fountain:

what to write but the desire to bathe in your dimples?

for water, forever scare, bubbles from your cheeks. a cascade offering I am too eager to lap up.

for they contain soil so sweet it is where the gods of our continent planted the first corn seeds. a soil so sweet it sowed humanity.

these dimples are the pantheon's occulus, and I am an architectural historian staggering in awe as it allows the past to be blanketed snow. they absorb all sound. muffle fear. allow a peek of sky to glimmer through.

star eyes:

we have slept under the same moon for nineteen years. we have slept side to side for nearly half a year.

how strange our womanhood: one of shrinking and expanding, of our bodies deciding to work in tandem with the tides of our softness. how beautiful is this womanhood, where we can coincide and find common ground despite me bursting through the soft underbelly of a hammock valley and you persisting to bloom, never drowning, in torrential downpours thwt threaten to uproot every time.

moon:

how quickly we get used to our own reflection. every time i look in the mirror right now i am shocked. who am i if not a faded pink? or burnt chesnut?

i have kissed you with your raven hair, grown quite attached to the buzzed patch that meets your neck. when we first touched i twirled my fingers with your deep blue hair, elated to feel the ocean. the multitudes you contain, all self-made.

birch tree:

you have never made me uncomfortable. the world has tired me today; after three hours of drive through tears and fiteen minutes that left me feeling wretched.

I want to know everything about you, including

what you think about when you trace those tempting fingers on yourself. if you linger on your chin, stop at your collarbones, or want to grasp at your legs (because those parts I can never let go of). because when, three thousand kilometers away (and sometimes less than one) I do the same, your images fill my mind. your body in full reverly, feeling the tension pent up in your back. i see your fluttering eyelids, that twitch of a smile. your marathon breath is the one song forever looping in my mind.

do you read something? watch something? make scenarios up? or remember encounters?

today your favorite poet died. she sung the tune of your soul, a bark so layered and multicolored it grows tall and is impossible to chop down, yet you still let moss grow on your north side and host a hundred birds each year.

lover:

you fill me up. i have swallowed you whole and have not retched in the process (my nonexistent gag reflex finally serves a purpose). your eyes have taken posession of every crevice of my pancreas, and this is the sweetest bile i have ever tasted.

butter:

i have called myself by many names. ace, aro, poly, bi, queer, gay. somehow fem was always at the forefront. there was something about dressing for myself and the gaze of other women (never the men that have scrunitized me time and time again) that resonated deeply. something about keeping myself tender and bringing that softness out in those i love (and knowing when it is okay to be hard).

a little over a year ago i asked alex for a reading while at costco with my mother. she said: i needed to be patient to find the love i truly desired, an equal love, and was ready for new beginnings. i cried by the spinach artichoke dip and knew it was time to let go of someone who could only teach me so much and whom i could never love the way he deserved.

what my heart (l)earned after those two years was sincerity, patience, communication, compassion, to be at peace the avocado (a rough exterior and mushy interior, but always a stone fruit underneath it all). these are the lessons i approached you with, my heart an open wound.

you have sewn those stitches up for me. i keep going back to that time in the airplane with my sister when she said that there is just too much love in my heart. the beauty of us is that i can love you in the way you deserve: softly and with fierce pride to be only yours. all that love that was oozing out now has a direction, and it is such an honor that you accept it day after day.

taquito:

te quiero bañar en mayonesa

y salpicarte con chile, asegurarme de

cortar tu acidez

y honrar tu paladar a la vez.

te quiero envolver en una tortilla después de rostizarte lentamente,

manternete cálida en un comal

y siempre añadirte una pizca de canela (para complementar tu esencia de mezcal ahumado.)

chai:

today i wandered an art museum with an old friend, whom i am sure i have told you about. grace went to simmons for a year until she had to transfer back to mexico, she's in her second year of med school. i texted her about how to use a strap on in november, and we giggled at our gayness amidst bird women and strange towers today. on our way to the museum, i asked her how she was doing, how she felt a year after leaving a women's college. she says she feels more at peace than she ever has. she has learned to face her fears, and although she stays quiet about herself, she has learned to love her parents and is actively trying to understand them. she will not pursue anything for a long time--there is school, and the pain of hiding love for her is too much. i tell her i have never been this in love in just a few words: "she is the sweetest."

i hope you know that i am working towards shouting our love from the mountains that tower over me, from the jade hills in which i was reared. i hope you know that this is the first time that everything feels worth it. you fill me with a reassuring safety: that somehow somehow our love can be and will be accepted. this is the spell i am sending out into the world today, the spell of us.

ink-stained fingerprint:

there are a few things on my mind today. your sleepy eyes. how warm you feel. wishing i could be there to pull up the blankets for you. you returning to the valley, that wonderful place where we can hold hands and kiss in public and it’s nothing and everything. how you keep going back to florida, keep facing things, even though it’s exhausting. how much you love your brothers and your mom (and all the cookies you had over break, so now you’re extra soft). how we have five months of uninterrupted interaction—and how you promise me a future. 

i have had this fountain pen since ninth grade. a week ago i thought it had finally given out, but all it needed was a couple of shakes to get used to ink flow again. maybe that’s how you are. resilient. deserving of rest. 

my lavender bushel:

“it is effortless

it just makes sense to be with you 

it is a privilege to love you

and to be important to you like you are to me” 

today i learned that you like the weird, cheesecake, the afternoon, little jorunna parva. the softness of your spirit it’s always in a good way: getting you flustered, seeing you cup your face in your hands. seeing you soft reaffirms me like no other. 

for the past ten years i have had no real concept of my appearance. in my mind's eye i feel the same, as if when i was ninety two pounds and one twenty and one fifty seven.

my tin girl: 

there is a lifetime of rigidity ahead of us. you fill me with the desire to learn to be flexible. not just so i can wrap around and move with you. but to be able to adapt like you have, bouncing back always. 

and there is the desire to be strong. to be able to lift furniture and lift each other, bring a press down and keep pushing. you are already so strong—stomping around in those boots of yours. it’s only a matter of time before the biceps match the heart. 

yes, i knew one other woman before you. 

but never like this. from the first moment we touched the two months i spent running cold and confused back to my room vanished. touch was no longer performance. it became a celebration. a new way of understanding you. 

do you remember that indian summer night? when i emerged from the bathroom to find your bare back as you faced the birch trees on your wall?

do you remember that tuesday in late september? after we had spent sunday learning how well our lips fit between each other? (you had asked me to pinch your nipple that languid sunday morning and i fell in love with how direct you were) after you had shown up drunk on celebratory margaritas at my door, giggly and chatty and flushed? i wanted to give you everything then, nobody had ever celebrated first kisses with me that way before. but we were not ready—your roommates were boisterous, everything felt so new. 

do you remember fall break? after a star is born? you were sipping that god-awful whiskey and i was staring at you cross-legged on your bed, still unable to understand how the most beautiful woman i ever had met let me stay over like this. we were still figuring it out then but you screamed my name and the entire room lit up. i still love returning to that moment every once in a while, to remember all the new ways you have taught me to love. 

do you remember the first time you pulled me down on that chair? you had me soaked, you have me soaked all the way through for the past three weeks. you told me to come for you and i wanted to say that’s all i’ve been doing for the past month.

do you remember the first time i pinned you down? your eyes were satellites that day, baby. i never thought i could orbit with them this way. 

doe:

I cannot pretend to know your struggle. 

I know the struggle of beady eyes, of lewd remarks at supermarkets, of a man trying to kiss me and ten of my friends when we were turning thirteen and he was twenty seven. for eight months my struggle was unpredictable, understanding one moment and slamming me against the classroom door the next, forced touch and grey lines. 

after those moments all i wanted was softness. i wanted permission to shed my skin, and someone to be alright with the process of it growing back, no matter who i looked like afterwards. 

love:

thank you thank you thank you thank you for today (and for every day). 

thank you for giving me flowers that august afternoon. i had gotten flowers only once before—for my nineteenth birthday, a gift from a bosom friend who is long gone and whom i should write to—but never like this. never flowers that spray on cologne, and buy wine and try peaches for the first time and are not afraid to get a little muddy if it means the best view of the clouds and of each other. you blended right into that summer day. 

(i was always the one getting the flowers for others—keeping them in the fridge, plucking them from the sidewalk at school and during my walks, leaving them hanging on the door to be found a week later.) 

the person i left flowers for taught me how to dry them. with that first bouquet, i resolved to put that skill to good use. and so i have saved something from every bouquet after that. your consistency is admirable. your love is too expansive to fit in a bottle of trader joe’s. your love is crunchy and fragile in the best way possible and still sweet-smelling.

thistle:

I want to know what you were like on the night of february 13th, 2018; and then where you were on april 29, 2018. what your mind looked like on june 21st, 2015. how long your hair was on november 06, 2013. 

if there is one thing that i have learned about you from july 04 2018 until january 07 2019 is that you are incredibly complex. you are a human being by yourself. you are a woman—with supple flesh and skin like my chevron flannel sheets and hair as dark as the sky i can see from my shower. there is so much love and thought behind your seaglass eyes. 

when my family moved to monterrey a river cut through the city. still does. the river was dry dry dry, just an empty basin, jagged desert spine. but then the rain came—a torrential downpour that had me locked in the halls of my high school for three hours one fateful afternoon—and there were streams. crystal clear; people would come down and bathe in them. and then bushes, mangled and raggedy. and now there are entire trees. these are your legs; chaotic orchards bearing the most beautiful fruit. it is completely in your hands when you want to show the fruit, when you want your flowers to bloom, and that makes you beautiful. remember that. 

we skirt around the future, joke about cottages and long commutes, and i do not mean to scare you. we share glimpses of our past (i know i seem nostalgic, pero no lo soy, te juro) and i do not mean to bury you. for if there is one thing you have gifted me it is the present. from the start: shush, do not worry about when we will collide. there is only this iced coffee, there is only this bad movie, there is only this tower fan and sticky summer. there is only love.