Stories

Earth. Spirit. Sky

My love.
Words always fail me when it comes to you. 

How do I tell our story? In my mind, it is an epic. It needs an orchestra. A conductor. An usher to guide people through a darkened theatre with a flashlight, annoying everyone, garnering glares and stares that go tsk, tsk, tsk. 

When the curtains go up, we will be standing there. I will be stubborn and you will be proud and at our initial encounter, fire will pass between us and the sun will cross over the moon, the planets will whisk and whir and everyone will realize that we are meant to be.

Except us.

It will take us days, months, years to find one another again.

I will get lost in the city. Travelling there every day by train. Learning to be quiet. Learning to disappear into the background. Refusing to acknowledge that I am anything other than a mind filled with thoughts and bookish knowledge until my spirit collapses in the dust and I begin to crumble.

And even then—you won’t be there. 

You are somewhere else. Learning your own lessons. How to care. How to conjugate all of the verbs. How to let someone in. 

The scenery changes. The seasons will roll forward one, two, three, four layers of earth and sky. And then we will find ourselves again, standing in a park, life blazing between us and I will tell you that I am having a hard time sleeping and quitting smoking and you will tell me that it is just a phase. 

You are right. But I don’t know that then. 

We’ll sit there under the pavilion and I will feel so close to you and not understand why. You, my adversary. My friend. The one person I have always been afraid to love. For this brief moment we will feel at home and then the time will come when we have to say goodbye and we will go again, in opposite directions to our separate corners of the world. 

The sky rages with thunder and lightning. I stand outside and sense the fierceness of love telling me to wait. To hold on. To hold out. To not give up. It is getting harder and harder to believe. To understand why it is I have come here. To do the work I so desperately want to do. To be helpful. To have value.

Somewhere across the river, you are there, watching the same sky from a wooden porch. Your smoke spirals and curls before the wind blows it out and lifts it away. Hold on, hold on, hold on it says…

So many things. So many experiences. So many moments that drive us to prayer. 

How do I show them all? How do I tell you in a card, in a text, in a heart, in a kiss how much this journey has meant to me? I cannot condense our love. Cannot contain it. It is the kind that grows without watering. Without light. I can only feed it. Only blow it up more. 

You tell me our love is bigger than Betelgeuse. Deeper than the Marianna’s Trench. For me it is like peace folding and unfolding, over and over again, steady as a heartbeat. 

Words.
Words.
Words.

There are no words that tell the truth of my love for you. There are only stories. And stories. And more stories. Stretching back, carving themselves into stone, like water pressing into the ground, finding its way back to its source. 

And just like that, we are awake. 

The music slows. The curtain falls. The crowd shudders. Bursts into furious applause.