With (You), Without

There are nights when I am awake and I ask myself if my life started with you, and all that was before was only rehearsal — shadows practising the shapes that one day your body would give to me in light. For what am I now but the man that once had you? I myself have been splintered into that one truth, while all other names I carried feel false. With you I was being; without you I am the vibration of being, still ringing, shuddering, even after the voice has fallen still.

With you, I learned what it meant to be in body. Before you, I was spirit and bone, broken, floating, ungraspable in some vague abstraction of living. But the first time your lips brushed the space just below my ear, I fell into myself. My flesh came to think it was real. Your hands were no longer hands, but summons, orders, commanding my very skin to wake up.

And awakened, I was. To hunger. To heat. To holiness. With you, I discovered I was not made of thought but rather of pulse, and that pulse only responded to your nearness. Without you, I'm still pulsing, but the rhythm no longer has an anchoring point, beating to nothing. Looking for the music that it once belonged to.

You did not unmake me because you stripped my senses from me; instead, you unmade me because you revealed that I was never clothed to begin with. Every kiss that you left was not embellishment; rather, it was revelation -- pulling back veils that I was not aware were veils. I remember your blouse coming down your shoulder, revealing to me, not merely skin, but the truth of mortality -- that there was life, and though fleeting, could feel eternal when pressed to lips. With you, I tasted, not desire, but knowledge. Without you, I am Adam banished, wandering the ruins of the garden, holding the fruit pit you left in my hand.

And God, your eyes. I think quite a bit of the way they looked at me, not as if discovering, but recognizing. As if you had been carrying the memory of me through centuries, and in that moment, we settled the debt. You saw me as I longed my whole life to be seen, not as a man but as a meaning. With you, I was no longer an accident; without you, I am again faceless, a shadow rejected by the world and scorned by the knowledge that once I was chosen.  

What is love if not the violent tenderness of belonging and losing in the same breath? You were never mine to lose, but you kept me. You remade me, clothed my naked ribs with the silk of your laughter, and my hands still remember the liturgy of your body. I can remember —without suggestion or effort— the slope of your shoulder beneath my lips, the divinity of your collarbone, an altar given vows too silly for time to honour.

Do you think back to that night when even silence seemed to hush for us? When the atmosphere thickened and trembled, preparing for what we might do with our mouths? The first time our lips touched didn't feel like finding, but returning. Together we became whole, like two halves of a flame coming back together. I kissed before, of course, but never have I drowned. With you, to drown was to come back to life. Without you, I don't so much drown as I take breaths of air that taste only of your absence.

Every inch of your skin is a scripture that my mouth still recites in the dark. Your collarbone, where I swore silently that I would never let the night become cold again. The hollow of your throat, where my lips insatiably drank the fever of your pulse. The curve of your waist, turning into rebellion, and where my hands learned that love is not motionless but trembles. With you, my body did not speak as much as it prayed. Without you, prayer is for the profane, because there is no god I recognize aside from that for which I worshipped in the sanctuary of your flesh.

I have attempted to live as if you didn't really happen to me. I have attempted to speak, smile, and pass the hours with you absent, and without tasting you in my mouth.

But it is pointless. My body remembers better than my will. My palms still close, expecting the weight of your back. My lips still part, expecting the heat of your breath. Even the air will betray me, morphing into your hair, when the night heavies too long. With you, every second was numbered. Without you, time is only eleven repetitions of absence. 

Maybe that's what grief is: not grief at all, but memory that will not submit to time. Grief is my body telling me that you are still here. It allows me to feel your weight in my chest at dawn. It lets me wake in the indent of you on the pillow. It takes my hunger and starves it into fidelity - I cannot touch another, not because I am holy, but because I am ruined. With you, my desire was infinite; without you, desire is dead, a monument to the one body that ever knew how to respond to mine.

The cruelty is this: that I know the exact shudder in your inhale when my mouth drew near your shoulder. That my lips still remember the contour of your breastbone, the whisper of the fabric yielding, the tremble of surrender that shuddered, as though my kiss was not a touch, but a revelation. With you, love was cruelty made exquisite. Without you, cruelty is all that remains, and beauty is only the memory of your body trembling beneath mine.

Yet still— even in this wasteland, I would not reverse us. I would give ten thousand sane years for another delirium of you. I would rather die in your arms a thousand times than live untouched once. What is life but to have once burned? With you, I was flame. 

I do not ask you to come back. Not that I would dare. To come back would dilute the sanctity of what was divine in its ephemerality. But I do ask this - If you feel your hand someday adrift on your collarbone, if only to pause at the valley of your throat, out of quiet sensibility, and something transiently accosts you there, let it be me. And if, at some juncture in current existence, you part your lips without a thought, feel an unwanted breeze skimming them, let this touch a reminiscence of my mouth that continues to exist in you. I belonged with you. I belong without you - at least semantically - but more appropriately, I belong to you through the imprint you left upon me.

If we are never again to make contact with each other, I can at least have my eternity be this: to roam the rubble of myself, forever whispering your name into the ashes, kissing the essence that lingers on without you. You have been mine, "forever," temporarily, I am yours, without interminably.

Still remembering,

Still burning,

Still yours,

- The One Who Loved You Outside of Time