Starstruck, Still

Ah… you know, it’s a funny thing,

celebrity.

That fleeting rush,

that moment when the world blinks,

And you find yourself standing before someone larger than life.

You gasp.

You stammer.

Your heart flutters.

And then… it ends.

The lights go out.

The god becomes mortal.

You see them again,

and it’s never quite the same.

But her?

She defies that law of diminishing wonder.

With her,

my heart becomes ungovernable.

It doesn’t race - it revolts,

Battering against the walls of my chest

as if it could break free,

climb out,

and wrap itself around her like arms made of pulse and panic.

It isn’t infatuation.

It isn’t lust.

It’s something more...

Visceral. Violent.

Holy.

When she touches me,

even the briefest graze,

the kind of contact you'd forget with anyone else -

my body goes to war with itself.

Not in desire,

but in devastation.

"More," it says, "please, more."

And yet,

in the same breath,

I pray she doesn't.

Because every time she does,

she leaves behind a hunger

that logic cannot pacify.

I have loved her in silence.

I have loved her beside me.

I have loved her with words left unsaid

and with hands that trembled from restraint.

And the cruelty, the exquisite cruelty,

is that this isn’t something that fades.

Not with time.

Not with distance.

One month. Eight. Five years.

The feeling is the same -

cataclysmic.

I don’t love in half-measures.

Never have.

I love with ruin in mind.

With the kind of intensity that either builds empires,

or burns them to ash.

And when she reads this,

when she tells me she’s read it,

my heart will erupt again,

like it always does.

Like it always will.

We have sat in silence,

side by side,

and still,

still, I nearly collapsed from the weight of her nearness.

God help me…

I hope I never get used to it.