You are the best parts of all the things I never thought I’d have

You saw something in me that I thought I’d lost.
It was there, faint and fading,
swallowed down until I had become a white washed room instead of a dying star.

When I look at you I can feel love trying to escape me like a thing alive.
It scares me, makes me remember how it feels to be human,
that delicate balance of warmth and tendon, hope and fear,
Of the forest fire I’d been hiding in my lungs for years.

Sometimes I forget who I am, until you remind me.
I forget how things are meant to taste, how time is meant to pass.
A steady stream in place of years spent in stops and starts,
collecting inches between all my favourite memories.

You remind of the comfort to be found in well knit bones,
a miracle among miracles, the strange and quiet poetry of your breathing.
When you gently push aside my clothes you do not find me wanting,
and kiss me so single mindedly that I wonder what you find.
If my mouth is moist and a little sour from the wine,
Or if you taste the smoke and gristle of all my past failures.

(You are the best parts of all the things I never thought I’d have.)