I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you’ve ever said to me. If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you. You would say it’s too soon to feel this. You would ask how I could be so certain. But some things can’t be measured by time. Ask me an hour from now. Ask me a month from now. A year, lifetime. The way I love you will outlast every calendar, clock, and every toll of every bell that will ever be cast.
I want to spend all my days with you. Wrestling over remotes; playing in the mud. Throwing each other in pools. Fighting over the last piece of cheesecake. Killing each other over which TV show we’re gonna watch. And then not watching it anyway. I want to make you mad and then kiss you. I want you and me. Forever.
I think it’s great for two people to be together. That is a good number. I think, that to keep it alive though, you can’t spend every day together. It wears out the magic, Love means nothing to me if it’s not fortified with fierce, painful longing, brief explosive instances of furious passion and intimacy and then a sad parting for a time. In that way, you can give your life to it and still have a life of your own. I think some couples spend too much time together. They flatten out the potential for experience by constant closeness. Passion builds over time like steam. Let it rage until it’s exhausted and then leave it alone to let it build up again. Why can’t love be insane and distorted? How can it be vital if it has the same threshold as normal day-to-day experience? Why can’t you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you’re nearly sick with anticipation? And then when desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back it its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before. When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time. That matches the inferno of life. Otherwise you poison each other with your presence day after day as you drag each other through the inevitable mundane aspects of your lives. That is the slow death that I see slapped on faces everywhere I go. It’s part of the world’s sadness that’s more empty than cold, poorly lit rooms in cities of the American night.
Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.
I ask myself why, and in that same breath, as I watch you, I get my answer. It’s everything about you; it’s that teasing smile, that warm scent. It’s the curve of your arms, the tousle of your hair, the ring of your voice. It’s just everything about you. But more than that, it’s everything about me. It’s everything about the way you make me laugh, cry, smile and hurt. It’s everything about the way you make me feel. And that’s everything that I cannot, and would not, want to let go of.
I keep thinking of how much I love talking to you. How good you look when you smile. How much I love your laugh. I daydream about you off and on, replaying pieces of our conversations; laughing at funny things that you said or did. I’ve memorized your face and the way that you look at me. I catch myself smiling again at what I imagine. I wonder what will happen the next time we are together and even though neither of us know what the future holds, I know one thing for sure; You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me.
