Before Longing

Before longing, I believed I was complete. I believed I moved through life as one moves through a house, a sufficient room here, a sufficiently lightened window there. And then you appeared—not even in body, not yet in the intimacy of being nearby—but in mind, in the trembling ghost of possible. And in a flash, the house collapsed into dust, and I was there in my own nakedness before a temple, one that I've spent my life on the edge of and, because I never dared go inside, I truly didn't know I've always had within me— your being its altar, its hymn, its whole architecture.

Before longing, there has already been a trembling. A stillness before the clouds, an unbearably tense anticipation situated somewhere between a heartbeat and a silence. I tell you— my veins began to ache with your name on them well before my mouth ever held it. My soul had already begun to practice its surrender to you long before you ever asked for it. There was no choice, no moment of decision. It isn't the cool fate of the stars, it is the fate that lives in my marrow, in a long-lived echo older than body and dust.

I admit, I do envy the man I was before I knew you, because he did not know this fire. And yet I pity him, since his peace was only a semblance of true being. And how blind he was, to gaze upon a world and not see you in it! And how dead he was, that the air in his lungs was just air, and not the ecstatic communion of breathing the same air as you! That man has vanished into ash, shed away by reason of your one being. All that remains is this—half a pilgrim, half a ruin, wholly yours.

Do you know what it is to be unmade by a thought? To tread upon the earth, and to find its substance dissolve into a haze in the air because another life holds the key to gravity? My nights became trembling temples of desiring unrest the moment you romped into my interior essence. My sleeplessness was not only stewing in desire, which is so common, but something almost more ethereal: awe. Awe that you could exist. Awe that my eyes were allowed to land on you. Awe that eternity came to sculpt you, leaving all the rest of us stumbling towards your original essence.

I used to think love meant possession. Now I understand it is surrender, complete and unreserved. Love is the presentation of oneself as fuel to a fire that will never ask, will never apologize, will never stop. To love you is not to love you for a return. To love you is to plunge into the vast annihilation of self that your song demands. My life, my name, my thought - they are no longer mine. They are tributaries, rivers rushing blindly into the sea of you.

I tremble at the ruthlessness of it: that I can hold this expanse of feeling and still somehow remain in the prison of distance, the ache of not being held, the silence of words never getting to your ear. And yet, already before longing has fully grown into its full suffering, I already know its taste. It tastes like you. It tastes like eternity bottled into a drop of wine too potent for man to drink. What is longing but evidence of God?

God would never devise a suffering so exquisite, nor a content so distressful, as the pain of loving you endlessly. I stand before the floodgates yawned open, and yet the waters drown me. I am saved, and yet ruined. My love, I am a paradox with flesh on it—whole only because you have broken me, alive only because I am consumed, luminous only because I burn.

And so I write to you now, not to beg, not to demand, but to sanctify this truth: that even before desire, I am already yours. I was yours before I drew breath. I was yours before thought knew its first shape. If the sole is eternal, then its eternity is this—an endless circling around you, the axis, the flame, the first, and the last word.

If absence is to devour me, let it be the absence of you. If ruin is to claim me, let it be the likeness of you. If the desire is to write its gospel into my marrow, then let it only inscribe your name because I am in love with you.

Yours, unmade and unmaking,

Yours, in tempest and in fire,

Yours, before forever, and after