Coming Home

I want to apologize for how frantic and perhaps even desperate I have seemed the past few days. I realize to you my behavior might just appear clingy--maybe even pathetic to a degree. Here's what you don't see: the depth of my love for you, that came on suddenly after lying dormant in my belly for so long. A need for your body and soul, for your touch and your voice and your warmth and your everything. A desire to feel safe, which after seeing you was fulfilled for the first time in years. A longing to give all of myself to somebody deserving of me, and who knows me better in all of my states of being than you? Here's what you don't see, and can't: an eternity of ache threatening to define me if I have to spend a day without you.

In three short months, you have grown for me from a memory I tried desperately to suppress and forget into a reality better than anything I could have expected. You are as you once were, but also so new. I wish nothing more than to explore who you have become, to come to know with intimate familiarity the spaces between your fingers, the freckles on your back, the curve of your spine as you stretch in the early morning light. It has been so long since I felt for someone such intensity that tears well in my eyes and flow freely. They are happy tears, tears of disbelief that you have come around again, tears of gratitude for your presence, tears that exhilarate my blood and set my bones shaking.

Do you remember the first time we talked about forever? Five years ago now, lying in your bed, a tangle of sheets and skin and energy. You looked into my eyes and I think without even realizing the words forming in your mouth, you asked me to marry you. And I, with the same disregard for the weight of my response, said yes. Did we mean it at the time? In our naivety, perhaps. I could not see much beyond the months ahead, could not see how I would change, how you would grow and shift. Nor could you. But surely the passion that we felt in that moment lent some truth to our words.

You told me last weekend that you would not--could not--live your life without me by your side. I smiled and laughed, unsure if you were serious and unwilling to believe that someone could care so much for me as to think about a world absent my being, and reject it. What I should have said was this: I won't let you. Younger versions of ourselves willingly let each other go, convinced we would find something, someone better. Fate shook its head and sighed, knowing we would discover in time the faults in our logic. Have we ever learned a lesson so painful, so wonderful? You cannot live without me. I tell you now, with the same sincerity you showed me, that I cannot live without you.

Our history is marked as much by pain as it is by love. Years ago, we hurt each other callously, thinking our youthful skin would heal the wounds we inflicted. There is ache in our hearts we have not yet named, blisters still forming and scars not yet dissolved.

We are learning how to heal. It has not been easy, of course, but then again a love as wild as ours cannot help but be tumultuous. At times it feels as though the distance between us, the literal miles that separate us, have conspired against our reunion. But as I told you today, in words unable to communicate the weight of their truth, it will get easier. The space between us is an obstacle, yes, but one we can surmount. What are a few months apart when compared with a lifetime together?

You told me today that neither of us should have to work for a relationship. It should come naturally, you said. I cannot deny that the last week has been bumpy, the most unnatural our joint presence has felt since we ripped ourselves from each other four years ago. But I refuse to discount the overwhelming joy and freneticism that fills the air when we are together. These fissures in the road are disruptive, but they can be fixed. I will take the asphalt of my remorse and fill each pothole with love, tenderly pave over our sorrows with the promise of forever.

I told you today never to let me go. You told me to relax. Everything's fine. But "fine" is too commonplace to describe us, darling. It always has been. Our story is defined by the immensity of our passion, by the enormity of our need for one another. "Fine" is infinitesimal in comparison to who we are together, to us.

Here, love, is my hand. I offer you my world, I give you my everything.
Join your palm with mine.
We have always been one.