in love

It is the strangest, wildest thing to be in love. The things that once made perfect sense seem to mean so little; and everything that was confused, scattered, broken... seems to form a perfect blue sky, the most wholesome sigh in my belly. You leave, and I wave wistfully at you through the gate. You gently kiss my cheek, and I know I will trace the shadow of your lips all day. It is absurd. I feel as vast as an ocean, and so hilariously fragile, so easily breakable -- but whole. Literature always taught me that it wasn't possible to feel whole -- but I do, I feel as though the universe has filled me up from my forehead to my toes and I am billowing in the wind, I am wide and complete and so deeply satisfied, so gentle with the world, so at peace. For the longest time, I forgot how to read love poems. They made no sense, they were too soppy, too personal, too much. One could love other people, but how could one be in love with them like this, how could one ache so desperately to graze their lips or to catch a shaft of sunlight on their cheekbone, how could one know someone intimately enough to hate them, to judge them, and still feel only desire, oceans of it wrapped in one's mouth? I thought it could be true only at 14, only when desire is silly and half-uttered and unrequited. But I am not 14, I am older, old enough to have broken hearts and moved so swift that nobody could touch my receding back -- and here I am, back in this room with my desire as big as a house, as a country, nowhere to go and no wish to leave. I map the stains winter sunlight leaves on the furniture, on the floor, on the walls. I wait for you to come back, simply so I can lie in your arms for hours. It is absurd. It is fiction and film, and so hilariously human, so obvious that I never thought I would feel it again. This is also what literature says, is it not? That these feelings are fleeting, and so important, so real -- they add colour, and scent, and flavour to this whole bare task of living, of going on, of pretending as though you will reach somewhere different from where you already are at the beginning of every day. Suddenly there is meaning, and of course it exists in the trees and the sunlight and the fragmented moments that I collect like a madwoman, like a child -- suddenly there is meaning and it exists also beyond me, it exists in the solid, warm body of a lover, and that knowledge frightens me, aches in my belly, and curiously uplifts me, leaves me afloat on the gentle wind. I trust you, and I trust life, and I am here with trembling fingers and tender skin, I am ready to be broken and remade, smashed against a wall of glass only to be picked up again with loving fingers. It is so human, so human.