In lieu
Complex and simple, rich yet fluid, primal but transcendent. Words I use to attempt to describe the ball of feelings when I am with her. I have found myself staring at her in wonderment, unable to comprehend our reality.
I am used to wielding words to construct my reality and to make sense of it. But I am at a loss of words when it comes to her. I cannot find the words, so it feels unreal. Sometimes I try using metaphors, but they pale. It is as though her arrival rearranged the particles I am made of — I am still the same person with the same make up, but I am permanently changed. Every single bit that flows within me carries a different tune.
One night early in our relationship, I held her hand across the table while we listened to a friend speak at an event. She had to respond to a text on her phone, so I set her hand free. But she didn’t let go, holding on to me for the length of the speech. What are the odds of finding another hopeless romantic?
Three months in, she sent me a Slack invite (I cannot believe she beat me to it). She truly knows the way to my heart.
She grasped my modus operandi, right from the beginning. She embraced my spirit of experimentation, my paradoxical desire to seek aliveness while being unattached to life, my obsession with documentation and self-quantifying. She is the first and only person to understand what time means to me and how it determines my life.
She redefined me by using new descriptors on me, changed the way I perceived myself with the way she looks at me — like I am the most precious. A couple of hundred mornings later, she still looks at me the same way. She softens my edges and gives my intensity pause. Just by being her.
I have taken on a different quality, inarticulable except evident in the pictures of us together. By her side I am relaxed and light. I keep being astonished by what was previously unknown to me: dimensions of my self, unlabelled emotions, an anticipation of our future, a fierce will to uphold our story.
I couldn’t find the words, and merely saying I love you is no longer enough, so I hope this will do in lieu.
