her_citizen

you told me lots of things. lots of very sweet things.

"i love everything about you, and everyday i want to learn you better" that's what i think, in case you ever wondered.

in the dark hours of the night, when the clocks have no longer a purpose and the ceilings stretch to the skies, these feelings grow harder to contain, they take shape of everything, and i do wonder if you ever feel them.

if somehow these feelings reach you.

i close my eyes and hope that they do.

that they don't.

alas, orpheus is here to take me tonight and i shall let go.

all the things i feel for you and shove down kept peeking and wanting out.

you need to know.

~~~~~~~ part 5 ~~~~~~~

it was indeed a love letter.

and perhaps it was all it was ever meant to be.

you need not answer. truly, despite my requests. if you would rather let this fall into the quiet, let it, i will understand, and i will move on, gently. and if you feel nothing of what i feel, say so, or don't, i will take that too, without bitterness, and fold these months away like a letter put back in its envelope.

what mattered was only this: that the feeling was spoken aloud, travelling beyond me. that somewhere, on some ordinary evening, you knew. well, kind of.

so that is all this is.

a confession, one i had imagined going in a thousand ways i might have thought of all of them, each one carefully considered, each one waiting for the perfect moment. but perhaps there was never a perfect moment to be found, the feelings simply grew too loud to ignore, and i could not keep waiting for a time that may never come.

so yes, this too, is a love letter.

~~~~~~~ part 4 ~~~~~~~

it is part of the reason why i have liked you from afar, patiently, silently all this time. maybe i am a fool for entertaining a world where you feel the same. the truth is, i would not be so bothered by that reality. i have already gained something i never expected to find: a friend in you, and for that i am more grateful than i know how to say. but i cannot do the sleepless nights anymore, so please: do you picture me like i picture you? am i in the frame from your point of view?

perhaps you might say that it isn't so much about feelings, i will dare be presemptuous and assume those might be present, however faint, and it is only time and space that refuse to conspire in our favour.

if that is the case, then i can be patient. some things are worth meeting only when the season is right. after all, people have crossed oceans for less, they have written themselves into poems, into songs, into histories, for the brief hope of being known by someone extraordinary.

waiting, beside all that, feels like a very gentle thing.

at last, i concede.

~~~~~~~ part 3 ~~~~~~~

whether you have a spare vase you could lend me, just for a little while. somewhere to place everything that keeps spilling with nowhere to belong. i have tried carrying it myself, but feelings are strange things, they become heavier the longer they remain unnamed.

i think, sometimes, that all i am waiting for is the smallest permission. because if there were even the smallest space for me within you, i would tend to it with reverence. i would learn the weather of your silences. i would water what you had long ago stopped expecting to live. where you believed the soil had given up, i would kneel without complaint, trusting that roots often survive long after the garden appears forgotten.

and when the first green thing dares to emerge, neither of us would need to call it a miracle. it would simply be the inevitable consequence of being cared for.

i'd give you an ear that would listen, a shoulder that would not tire, a heart that would make room for yours. whatever i could carry with you, i would.

i know i am asking for something that may never be mine to receive, perhaps that is selfish. but the matters of the heart have never been particularly respectful of timing, they arrive when they please, and ask impossible things of us.

~~~~~~~ part 2 ~~~~~~~

it seems like i keep beating around the bush, not saying what i have been meaning to. it would be wise to stop right here, i could always retract, salvage this, backtrack, though i suppose i may have already reached the point of no return.

what im trying to say so desperately, is this: i like you so very much, and i was not prepared for how much that actually is.

call me a yearner, a poet, a hopeless romantic, it shan't matter so much. the thought of you keeps me up in the darkest hours, until sleep becomes something to happen to other people.

i know this is a poor time for hearts to arrive unannounced. you have been tending so carefully to yourself this year, to your body, your mind, to all the quiet pieces that deserve mending. i would never ask you to set those things aside. but the heart is an impatient thing, mine, especially. it has layed still in silence for as long as it knows how, and i cannot ask it to lie still much longer.

so here i lay, torn between asking and not asking. it is such an extraordinary thing, to matter this much in someone's room without knowing. but i suppose i shall ask, because i want to know, i need to know. i can keep liking you quietly, devoutly, pathetically, the same way i have for the past months, but these feelings keep spilling and im running out of vases.

~~~~~~~ part 1 ~~~~~~~

i lay here in the dark, cradled by the blue light that's piercing my eyes and the light breeze coming from the window, rehearsing you.

i don't know what to do with someone who lives so thoroughly in the mind. you are not here and that is the plain, almost embarrassing fact of it. you are somewhere sleeping, presumably, doing the sensible thing that i cannot manage, and i am here constructing you out of nothing; an echo of a laugh, an engraved picture of your face by the ocean, out of the particular way the afternoon behaved when we were in it together, out of the smell in the air that day, out of the space between things, which is, im finding, enormous.

i was supposed to sleep long ago, but stillness feels too much like surrender. if i am still, i think of you with a completeness that is almost unbearable, not painful, exactly, but because it is so full, and i was not prepared to feel something this full at two in the morning on an ordinary night.

the truth is this is not the first ordinary night, or day for that matter, as such. my mind keeps inviting you so ordinarily, over and over, in an ordinary life i thought i understood.