Somewhere along the line, you unknowingly banned me from my phase of eclipses, that seemingly perpetual spell of darkening where illumination could find no refuge.
I never knew how difficult it would be to write about happiness, or how nearly unwilling I’d be to use that very noun. Even now, all of my instincts as a writer are reprimanding me for using such an abstract word in such an upfront way, are yelling that this sounds too much like the sort of elementary topic sentence that makes it impossible for a story to reveal itself piece by piece, shard by shard, one sliver at a time. But here I am, dodging my inclination to substitute “happiness” with some more ambiguous phrase: “seasonal contentedness” or “temporal satisfaction,” because in spite of my cynicism (or, perhaps, realism) for once, I want to at least make believe that I don’t think this is ephemeral.
I can’t help but to think of you as a montage – as instants formed, sort of like the strands of my own hair woven together in a thick fishtail braid. And so I espy us, collapsed on hills that I pretend are bluffs (because I am so very precarious, and often sidle away from you), wondering what the night clouds would look like if we still had imaginations, pretending we understand the world on a molecular level, and envisioning our bodies melting away into the soil, so that only our freckles and scars and pitted skin remained, forming the reflection of constellations in the sky overhead, like the Gemini twins – connected, consolidated. Or I see us on the floor of my room, you with all your external creativity, penning pictures on my palms, and me quietly wishing I knew how to do anything other than write. And then I remember you during sunsets on the river – you, artfully arranging plucked flower petals on my converged knee caps while stationed in a graveyard, and me knowing that we were mirrored echoes of one another, like the water and the sky before us. And when I can envision no longer, there you are, knocking on my door in the morning with a potpourri of my favorite fruits, or stumbling into my bed during the aurora after a meteor shower, or gifting me poetry anthologies with titles like, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love. (And ah, we don’t – forever wide-eyed and dreamless.)
We stumbled so suddenly (together), and your hands grasped me apace, before I became a shell in the ocean, seemingly burrowed deep within the sand and invulnerable to waves, but instead instantaneously drowned in the waters, adrift somewhere in that blue-green cavern. You walked me home in the rain on the night we met, and dried me off in your bed with the wind from your whispers, and I know that event to be a sentient metaphor, for although I am happy, I so often make a revolution and return to dreariness, but you are indefatigable, and are there to absorb even my most tempestuous deluges.
I am not Dante or Petrarch or any of the other great Italian poets, and I cannot compose love sonnets to slip under your doorway or in the pockets of your jacket, but know that my heart will always beat in iambs for you, with you. I am, I am, I am, it sounds, (in love with you.)
