I Love You

There is nothing to fear here. It is just the reality. We have more to fear in losing it than in admitting to its existence.

I hear your name in the sounds of my own breath, love’s mantra sung brilliantly in the suddenness of what must have been there forever. It is a truth whispered and shouted in the same note, a hope that springs eternal in the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever gazed into. I feel certainty as your head rests on my shoulder, and I feel an undeniable familiarity as your hand grasps mine.

There is no explanation for such a beauty, and the mind fractures as it tries to make sense of you. I know the Earth spins to give rise and fall to the Sun and I know the lightning I see in the distance gives birth to the thunder I feel shaking me to my core. I can make sense of most things that come my way in this life and I can find the cause of all good and bad that happens.

Yet here you are, looking into my soul, caressing the very parts of me long left abandoned, and I cannot make any sense of it, save that small spark of truth that shouts without care of who hears it. This is it, says the spark. Just be true to this and never see its end.

Faith is something that comes hard to those who have seen all they thought they knew destroyed by those who were supposed to be protectors. Trust, once used as a weapon against all that was true in the heart, is hard to find beyond the scars then born on my heart. But warriors - those who punch their fist through the ash and embers of that suffering - still find a way to hope. We who have survived and fought back search for the smallest light in the darkness and when we find it, we fight hard to give it life. We sometimes surrender when we have reached exhaustion, but we also find a way to get a second wind to never, ever, quit.

So then there is you; the curly locks of your hair tickling the skin on my arm, the warmth of your hand warming mine, those eyes melting the steel shroud I’ve used to protect my heart from lesser souls. You are no spark I am holding. You are a raging inferno and you burn right through my pretensions. I cannot hide this. I cannot pretend it isn’t there. I need to let it out lest in consume me whole.

I look into your eyes and the words spill out. No thought. No fear. Just the truth raging inside of me. I don’t know what to do with it but share it in the hopes it warms you, too. There is nothing to fear here. It is just the reality. We have more to fear in losing it than in admitting to its existence.

So, with nothing left to hide I lay on our altar, my chest flayed open before you. Protect me, and know I am there to protect you. There is nothing left for us to do but walk courageously into the morning light, stand in the rain together, and embrace each other in love, truth and the ecstasy of our existence.

I love you.