It’s unnervingly still. The air hangs quietly, the gaps of my inactivity punctuated. But the room is full. The ghosts of my made decisions visiting idly in bone-chilling proximity with the phantoms of my past fears. New ones enter wordlessly and take their place in my overcapacity apartment. Somehow, in the absence of anyone else, I find myself in a crowded room. Clinging desperately to a lifeline I have no way of verifying. I’m having my day in the sun and somehow I still manage to falter in the shadow of a cloud.

The truth is that I’m a drifter. Little more than a transient looking for a place to root. I live out of a duffle bag 99% of the time. I have a home, my own space, but I can’t be certain of where I’ll sleep. Because I’m always trying to find my way back to you. And so I don’t buy groceries, I’m not comfortable enough in my own bed anymore to sleep, I succumb to the dull roar of a peanut gallery of my own anticipatory delusions. At the end of the day, there’s so very little I can control. So very little of this space I occupy that is mine to command. One little origami boat bobbing in the wake of these unpredictable waters. I am desperately happy and desperately afraid.

Because I want you to choose me. Today, and tomorrow, and every other day that I live to see a sunrise. I’m not sure if you know it but I’m terribly fragile, and far, far too capable of crumbling. But this thing I have in me, this love for you, suffers no shortcomings. Everyday that I live to see a sunrise, it will be here, as strong as steel, for you.

It drags me forward into each new day that I am terrified to meet, into every moment I flounder through, every rain-soaked afternoon, across every shattered road. This vessel that I am is terribly fragile, so susceptible to anything that threatens it, but I cast myself into all these days I’d rather miss because they bear the opportunity of loving you.

I toss as I sleep and my heart races as I wake because to love another is not enough, not nearly. But you love me so well, I hardly find myself worthy on any given day of the week. So please, don’t attribute my fears to the way you show up for me. There aren’t words to quantify my gratitude for the way you love me. I just know that loving you is like sampling the finest wine, finding the most spectacular view, being caressed in the most scrumptious breeze. A world on the other side of that love would be stale and gratuitous and I don’t wish to know it. I’m terrified of having everything I’ve ever wanted and having to watch it slip through my narrow fingers.

*authored 21 July 2021