what you say and what you said

Live my life
Around a picture
Taken when we met
Spending all of my time
Chasing your silhouette



There are so many people who pass through a single life. Some are the concrete walls that hold us in, helping to hold us together, keeping in the good, or maybe helping us hold out the bad.

The people who are those well-read books with lovingly worn pages. You know those pages almost as well as the pages of your inner diary.

Some, who only stayed to write a single chapter in your life, but the kind of chapter that you couldn't have lived without.

Some you needed in ways you never even knew. Happy accidents of life, sunlight splashes peeking through the clouds.

Then, there are the mirage people. The ones who come into your life, looking so good, so beautiful, so achingly perfect that sometimes you wonder what it must like to be them. What it feels like on the inside to be interestingly, gorgeously perfect.

If you're like me, you might spend time chasing after one of those golden people. Chase, chase, chase, and chase some more. Telling yourself as you run yourself ragged that it will be worth it. It'll be worth it, because it just has to be.

Chase until you actually catch up to that glimmering oasis in the desert of people.

When you reach for it, to discover that everything you thought you saw was only a trick of the light. Golden dust motes floating through your fingers, what you were so sure was everything, turns into the nothing that was there all the time.

A trick of the light, a clever illusion and nothing more.

--

While I was looking down at the place in the road where I thought he would be, the place that I'd worked so hard to get to, standing in the midst of the nothing, the mirage, was when I found something so much more.

This time, no mirage. No smoke and mirrors. No empty words, no voids to fill where someone else had left a gaping wound.

And now...

There's this place inside of me that he lives. A film reel of moments that matter to only me.

Stolen moments in time.

The impossibly long sweep of lashes from those dark eyes, a color so deep, it's not brown. Couldn't be called brown.

Brown is for cocoa and earth and things that are plain, neutral, and to be forgotten.

Those eyes are a color so liquid and alive that no description of a color could ever capture it. It's a shade so luminous that not even the passage of time will ever be able to wipe it from my memory.

I call that color love. Two pools of light, banishing every bit of darkness inside me and leaving behind a sensuous warmth, a golden lamp glow of feeling. It fills up every particle of who I am, making me want to scream up at the sky in articulate joy.

For that feeling, there are no words.

For the fire between us, the feeling like a smell, a taste. Something deliciously rich, wanting to savor and devour it all at once. Wanting to draw it out for the fear it might not last, and needing to consume it ravenously to have all, to own it, to consume it the way it consumes me.

--

The best kiss of my life, the briefest. Just the pressing of two sets of lips, sweet seconds that play on a loop. Daring everything just for those seconds, not even a handful, where I was uncertain, tasting my heart in my mouth, crazy hopeful breath catching on the tattered lace of anticipation and finding purchase.

The callouses from mistakes past helping me to grasp exactly this.

Where that place exists, is the place it rains and never storms. The place where no matter how long I stay, it will never be long enough. And no matter what mistakes I've made, or what mistakes I will make, I will never forget that it was the mirage that led me to the rainbow.

And through the rise

and falling apart
we discover who we are