Breathing Hope Eternal

The spaces between your ribs are just deep enough for me to fall in.

It's there I find you are the nectar of honey and the salt of the ocean, fading magnolias and withered vines. I discover you are the scent of sunshine and freedom, the simultaneous flame of desperation and redemption. You are everything my heart has ever desired, everything my dreams have ever imagined.

You are tender lips and calloused hands, poetry whispered between crooked teeth. Sometimes, I imagine you sitting on the wharf with chalk smeared on your palms. I imagine you trying to capture the sunset between mortal hands, breathing life into sketches, dreaming ideas into existence.

You are beauty that is acute enough to hurt and hope bright enough to blind. The faith of the ages is woven between the fibers of your skin. You are everything I could ever be lucky enough to hold, but the truth is still curled in my lungs, reality is still trapped between my eyelashes.

I’m reaching for you, but I know, I can't be the sea in which you float, the stars that light up your paper-lantern-torso. I’m too far away, I’m too cold. I’m watching the sand run through my fingers; I’m knee-deep in the water and watching you set over the horizon.

I’m bidding farewell to the birds flocking together and dreaming of the day I can join them. Darling, I swear, we will be birds, we will be the wind. On my life, I promise, we will be the sky and the light; we will be the beginning and the end. We will tear gravity in half, cut through distance until we are omnipotent, until we are weaving fate into a rope strong enough to catch the curled edges of the map and pull them together.

We will live on Pangaea, we will live in nirvana. We will nest in the willow, dance among the oaks, drink from the Nile and kiss on the peak of Everest. We will render time useless, smash clocks between our fingertips, and leave their limp bodies strewn across abandoned fields.

We will carve our story in stone, sign it with our lips and let it stand as testimony; let it hold the story our mouths will be too busy to sing. We will have our hearts into the heavens to shine amongst the constellations, we will carve the rivers into the pattern of our veins, let the hymns of the brooks whisper our names.

Standing here, I smile when I think of all we will be, I wipe my tears away and silence the impatience boiling on my tongue. Right now, I am alone, I am an island, and I am sitting on foggy beaches watching the birds dissolve into the gray.

I am nowhere near where you are, but, love, I believe in the power of someday.
Darling, I believe in the power of us.