Once Were Two

Last night, while tossing and turning, generally unable to sleep, I tried to dissect infatuation from love.
I guess love always starts there, with some insatiable passion, a tangling of sheets and lips, a muddling of where your body starts and theirs begins. You might begin to feel something changing in your life, like the climax of a novel, the part where nothing can be the same after that.

You'll hear some crap on the radio that you made fun of a week ago, and all of a sudden, Guns n' Roses speaks to your soul like they know what's in it (and you know they don't), and you don't know what's happening. You leave the house or the bed or the bar and right above your stomach, it feels like Christmas morning in there -- boxes wrapped, waiting for the greenlight to tear them open and explore them.

(I always opened mine with careful discipline, because I knew the boxes would be gone after I open them all, and half of the allure was ripping the paper apart. Make it last, make it last.)

Infatuation is the best.

But last night, while mostly not sleeping, I had two absolutely heartbreaking dreams between sessions of picking love apart. They were heartbreaking because the things I wanted were happening in them, and neither of them can happen right now. And while it's my life's calling to explain these things that happen to me, I could not find words for this situation.

With only 26 letters to fashion an explanation, it's impossible unless you describe your whole world in one instant -- every breeze that blows, every hour that passes both fast and slow, every wave of goosebumps that brings you to your knees. The way cold water hits a parched throat after a long night, every shudder at every touch after that moment you figured out that you didn't want to "grab a drink," "eat dinner," or "watch a movie" with that person, that all you wanted was to be in the same room with him and it didn't matter what the hell you did.

Because everything changes after that, and it's irreparable and irreversible. By definition, that's damage, but it's what makes any good story worth reading.

I am damaged; irreparably and irreversibly changed. Make it last, make it last.