I cannot remember

I.

I cannot remember the first time I told you I loved you, although I am sure I said it first. I cannot remember whether you said it back. I only remember something about your breath — or maybe your voice, as unconditional as the sun.

It was not melodramatic, or even serious. It was as it was supposed to be. I set it down like a coffee cup on the counter on some insignificant Tuesday morning.

There was no point in making a big deal naming something that we had always known, that we had always had. What difference would it make whether we called it out? It lives in the crack of the door to the balcony, that gives us the full view of Shanghai pollution-painted sunrises, the circling pigeons trained to always come home, and the breeze that flutters my white chiffon curtains with movie-level montage romanticism.

It lives in the silence after you told me you were moving, when I quietly stepped aside so that you could pursue a chance at happiness, or success, or something that wasn’t me. It lives in the way you clenched your jaw, underdressed and aching from a five-hour motorcycle ride down the coasts of Taiwan, as I sat oblivious, listening to music and taking videos, clutched around your chest.

It lives in the moments of shrill, pained things never said right before we turn tail and walk towards our separate, infinitely long, infinitely nondescript airport terminals. It lives in that awkward, drawn out greeting when we have not seen each other in years, our small talk a chunk of styrofoam in between us. It lives in the first, long-awaited touch that collapses distance and falling-out-of touch into inconsequential memories.

II.

People, unlike paper and petals, aren’t made to float through the air. You remind me of the weight of my body. Unless I feel gravity, the force and severity of it, I’ll lose myself without noticing. It’ll slip away in a wide open opium surrender. The entire concept of me will drift endlessly, tendrils grazing the earth ever so lightly, the only trace a faint sketch on the surface of the Earth. You ground me, and bring me back from never-possible and almost-here.

I always keep room in my heart for the unimaginable — our moppy, messy-haired offspring running barefoot around on the island of Hawaii. Salsa on two as the first dance at our wedding. Waking up in the same bed and looking out the same window every morning. Committing. Remaining committed.

III.

I think about the bottom left corner of your face the most. I spend the most amount of time there, the soft patch of skin before your beard starts, and then a rough savannah. The corner of your lips, a sideways V, ever-edging closer to me.

Being with you is prayer. It is communion with wonder. As I swim through the privilege of astonishment — that you are a small, perhaps insignificant, gate for me to understand Source. It is the closest I get to the feeling that my soul is permeating out of my body, rattling the bars of it’s fleshy capture. The film between my existence and the universe is thinnest when I am in your presence. The field between us has a luminescent quality, as small vesicles and shocks transpire between our membranes.

IV.

I thought that waking up with memory and missing, would be sharp and quick, like ginger at the end of my tea. But the longing swam around briefly in the morning light and quickly exited left. You are never gone for long.

Yesterday you held me. My shoulders collapsed, my skin flowed off me like water, and you swallowed me. The moment I felt the soft thump of my aliveness, I began to cry.

Each time you kiss me, it is the wildest and wisest thing I know. It is a knowledge that my soul is a living and connected thing, constructed of high, bright light, and soft attention. I know every place anyone has ever gone, and the direction of returning voices, and how the universe wombs her children.

Our intimacy spiders from my shoulders, and I imagine peeling back my skin, the white knobs of bones gleaming, cut with dark rivers of your tenderness. It runs that deep. Your being stains into my thoughts. Your existence times itself with my breath. Who cares about three word sequences?