I crave what I might call life
not merely the act of breathing,
but the strange, incandescent feeling of being here.
Yet all I seem to see is blue,
then black and white;
the world drained of its fever,
its colors slipping quietly through my fingers.
My eyes are shallow as footprints in the sand,
erased almost as soon as they are made,
and I find myself sinking
into my own serendipity,
watching existence pass me by
day after day.
Sometimes, I wish for rain.
Not for the rain itself,
but for the petrichor
that ancient scent rising from the earth
as if the world were exhaling after a long sleep.
For ten seconds, perhaps,
it could cleanse something inside me,
wash the dust from my soul,
and remind me what it means to feel alive.
I hate that everything is ephemeral
that every beautiful thing arrives
already carrying the certainty of its departure.
That moments become memories
before we have even learned how to hold them.
I don’t want eternity.
I only want to feel brand new again
to wake up one morning
and find the world unbearably vivid,
to breathe deeply and mean it,
to look at the sky
and feel, for once,
that I am not merely watching life happen.
I want to be inside it.
I would give you the world, if only the world could contain what I feel for you.
My heart still burns with an ineluctable longing a fire without ashes, a grief without a grave. Your brown eyes remain an inscrutable mirror, reflecting a version of myself I can no longer reach.
I find you in the susurrus of the ocean, in the salt of forgotten evenings, in the reverberation of a laugh that time could never quite silence.
Perhaps I was never meant to remain. Perhaps I was only a liminal thing in your life a passage, a season, a brief constellation meant to illuminate what came after.
And still, I love you.
Not with the desperation to possess, but with the quiet abnegation of letting you become everything you were meant to be, even if I am absent from the becoming.
Some loves do not die.
They become numinous something sacred and wordless, buried beneath the architecture of who we become.
I think I’ll die loving you.
And perhaps that is not tragedy.
Perhaps it is simply what remains when love outlives its destination.