Love is Not

Love is not a vapid, complacent creature, but some kind of monster, cracking at my bones. You are a small thing in my veins, raging up and down from heart to cold hands, every day. You are the second in between breathe in/breathe out.

I am not the girl I want to be, nor the girl you see when you breathe into my neck, nor the hand that writes you letters. I am not a person made of cloth and yarn, I am not a person made of paper and ink, a person made of lists and half-dreams, made of scattered aspirations. I am not cold feet on tile at five am, not a person who collects animals and ideas. I am not made of stranger-smiles and fragmented conjectures and uncomfortable laughter.

I am not complete, mathematical, coordinated, sure.

We are made of the same recycled energy and stardust; I am nothing like you. You are a person made of gold and bitterness, a person made of love as winding and green as jealous vines, you are sweet transient blossoms, a vague taste of honey. You are a brand new thing, woken up everyday, a brand new thing, working out and up from a seed fed on the nectar of delay, love that hits you like rays of sun that have traveled through the silver-speckled blackness to splash all across your body.

Everyday your skin falls off, everyday my skins falls off. At night I see you naked as pliant bare muscles. At night I drift out of my skin and reach to you with invisible hands. You are a pair of luminous eyeballs. I am not a person made of perfect vision. I may be a person soft and indefinite as a cream-colored blur reflected through your steely blue-green gaze. Every night my skins falls off, every night I wait for you in the in between places, in the layers of dusk and dawn.

Love is not a patient creature, but she waits; but we wait.