silent nuances

I taste ‘I love you’ In each meal we share Especially those You make alone While my mind is occupied But my body hungry

I see ‘I love you’ On cold winter nights Spent bathed in bamboo sheets Our eyes meet And for the first time I am comfortable enough to keep looking

I smell ‘I love you’ When I am nestled Into the crook of your neck A mix of musk And sandalwood And you

It has been almost ten months since you kissed me in my living room and walked out the door. After you left, I didn’t cry as much as I thought I would. At the time I told myself it was because I had shed all of the tears in my body over the past three magical days with you; that there couldn’t possibly be any sadness left to squeeze out. All that remained was the emptiness of knowing that this was really, truly it for us. 

But now looking back on the girl I was when you last kissed me, I can’t help but think that maybe there were so few tears because a small part of me knew, even then, that your final kiss actually released me from a prison of our own design. That somehow, the love we shared welded a cage around us, in which we allowed ourselves to be euphorically happy and soul-crushingly sad and heartachingly anxious and deeply deeply comfortable all at the same time. 

If the breadth of my emotions spanned the height of the earth, you sailed with me to both its poles. You danced with me in the north - saw my purest states of joy, my unbridled laughter, a smile tattooed across my face. You also watched me break in the south - panic rising so deeply in my chest that my limbs went numb and my lips turned blue, tears pouring out of my eyes in the deepest of anguish. 

There is a reason the earth’s poles are uninhabited. No one can live in an extreme. And that’s what you and I were - living in an extreme, one that was so wonderfully joyous and debilitatingly painful in equal measure. 

And I am grateful, truly. Few get to explore the deepest valley of their emotions and even fewer manage to reach the highest peak. You and I did both and the view was so beautiful from the top. Even right down below gave me some of my greatest lessons. 

But now, as I reflect on that girl you kissed ten months ago and even further, on the girl you kissed for the first time in the dim light of your parents hallway all those years past, I realise that it’s time for her to stop venturing to the ends of the world to find what she’s looking for. Everything she needs is right here. Sometimes right here is enough. 

I promise That each moment I will work to Stitch the scars I have scratched Into my weary heart

So that when spring blooms I will be  Someone who is worthy Of loving you