Hasta la piel

You’d think that after almost seven years of having someone in your life they’d made the books. And sure, he’s mentioned in every text conversation I’ve had with every person I know. His name has been scribbled across my journals and books and skin even. Of course I’ve written about him. I just never played out every detail of the moments when we became one. In the cold, in the woods, in the sweltering heat, on the road, in my dreams, at the grocery store, in the middle of a track field. And last week I was laying in his arms in my car on the sixth floor of a random parking deck overlooking the Atlanta Skyline. For a couple hours we laughed and cried and spoke in darkness between foggy windows. I didn’t have to look him in the eye to know he was crying when the muscles in his cheek tightened next to my neck and shoulder. He’s the main reason why I sense and talk about the silent language between living creatures. I believe in unsaid deep communication because of him. Multiple times I could just take a drive with him and know whether he was burning inside with desire, resenting my selfish ways, and slipping away with sleep, or simply wondering what to do next about his father. And when I looked at him again just the other day, not once did his face light up, and it slowly stabbed at me knowing that I was the cause of the tugging on his face. His beautiful caramel colored face. His eyes and cheeks and spirits seemed to fall on his chicken sandwich, which at on point he used to revel in. I felt like a raisin wanting to shrivel up and die before he ever met me. 

Why did it have to be me to do this to him? 

And then I remember that no one before me had loved him so intensely and ceaselessly as I had. I kept wishing we could go back just three days before when he held me as if he’d picked me up from leaning over a cliff. I barely had to put any effort to feel like I was home again. He kissed my head and I honestly never felt like everything was going to be ok as much as I did in that moment. And now, breaking his heart for the second time, I sat there in silence in what used to be one of our favorite places. He could barely lift his gaze. Then he asked a question and my face pinched up in objection. But he had every right to know.

I’ve never felt so sure about someone. Strongly yes, but confident? no. Most of the time I know my infatuations when I feel them, but this is nothing like that. He’s the one I keep coming back to since I met him. To the world, there may be a million and one reasons to stay away, to move on, to say goodbye, but he moves me. And I believe love is more than just the emotion, it’s the tangible and intangible both combined that make you do things you like and dislike with the same pure intentions for the same outcome: others’ happiness. It’s what makes you buy concert or plane tickets just to be with someone. It’s what makes you wait hours on the other side just for a phone call of maybe five minutes. It’s what tears your walls and strips you to your core making you question everything about the once perfect and untouchable faith you had in the world. Love, to me, is the one that pulls and pushes and drowns and polishes...if you let it.