Forever, Briefly

Some nights, time ceases to know distance, when the moon softly cries across the floorboards with me sitting simply possessed not by thought, but by you. I write to you with quivering hands from the evidence of your touch, from a visceral memory too rich to justify. We were not in love, but eclipses, stars colliding. A breath stolen from eternity, but returned too soon.

You were mine: forever, briefly. How awful those two words behave together. Forever. In the way your eyes danced through my defences, as if you had known every other life before, and briefly, in the way you were snatched from my arms by the dawn, a thief too lovely to despise. 

I remember how you first looked at me, not with curiosity, but recognition. Like your soul leaned forward and whispered, “There you are.” You took a mere man and made him so much more. You made me poetry, not poetry inked in books, but poetry inked on skin; poetry in sighs; poetry in shivers; poetry in the madness of touch.

And how could I not love you? Every shadow of myself aflame. Every breath after that felt holy. Your name, once an unfamiliar sound, became the tenderest devastation in my mouth. I fed on your voice, as if it were communion. Your laughter became woven into the very fabric of my yearning; your absence unravels me, stitch by very stitch.

What magic was it when you held my hair, and I forgot my own name? When I kissed your lips, I tasted not merely a desire — but all the sweetness life had ever forgotten? I remember your eyes and their scrutiny on my fears; I remember you touched me not with your fingers, but with trust — and I became soft and would have crumbled, could have crumbled, should have crumbled.

But what is love, if not also absence? For no sooner had I learned your skin as if it were scripture, you were gone. Time, the relentless thief, turned its hourglass, and I watched while our forever became sand. Even now, I reach for you in my dreams - I wake to a cold pillow and the ache of knowing you too well to forget.

Do you find it in the lonely pause between moments, too? The remembrance of our time together -- fleeting and short-lived as it was -- deep within the whisper of my being, it reminds me of the kiss that never left my lips. I wonder, on a breeze that brushes your cheek, do you feel my breath? Do your fingers tracing over your collarbone remember mine?

Even now, I'd trade ten lives of comfort for one more night of delirium with you. I'd worship your body like a temple again. I'd lose myself in the sanctum sanctorum of your mouth. I'd surrender - without a thought - in the vastness of your sighs.

But perhaps that is how loves such as these were always meant to exist: like the flash of lightning, not meant to last, but meant to burn an imprint on your soul, so you might know to remember.

I do not ask you to return. I ask only that you never forget how I loved you-not in halves, but in whole. In great, wild, defiant whole-ness. I gave you the entirety of myself that had ever been in hunger. Every breath, every half-finished prayer, every star that I once wished upon, I give back to the cosmos with your name woven into its heart of molten fire.

Should we never meet again in this life, know that I shall walk it haunted — not by sorrow, but by the sublime ache of having once belonged to you. I was yours. I remain yours. Not in presence, but in echo.

Forever, briefly.

Yours — in ache, in fire, in silence,

The One Who Loved You 

Like the Sea Loves the Moon