Things I would like to do with you before I leave you
I would like to do it all with you before I leave you. I would like to live this life entire with you, before we leave one another. I would spend my every morning with you, our friendship renewed each day with hot sunshine streaming through open windows with white linen curtains. ‘Til we are white-haired and slow. Your eyes will always be young. I will sit on my favorite armchair and watch baseball on TV and curse our grandchildren. I would like to do it all with you before I leave you. ‘Til death do us part.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
~ Robert Frost
A few Things I would like to Do before I Leave You.
I would like to go camping with you and delay our return, twice,
I would like to bike tour with you,
I would like to spend our time with our friends and our families along an endless table on an endless lawn, with you.
Yes, I would like to make love to you
I would like to work together but apart with you at a cafe in the cool shade with Red dog napping, below
I would even like to miss you,
I would like to do things without you.
I would like to finish and then have sex with you again, after a cuddling pause.
I would like to make you breakfast in bed, once in a long while.
I would like for you to make me coffee in bed, often
I would like to road trip to hot springs with you and camp the night in a yurt by the river
I would like to cradle our first child with you, and talk over how to discipline her in a way that inspires her when she is older,
I would like to laugh with you, most importantly
I would like to cook with you, hammock with you, read in a hammock with you,
I would especially like be bored with you,
I would like to be angry with you, and learn to walk away, and learn to forgive you, and learn to be forgiven with you,
I would like to go to sleep each night by thanking you for being with me,
And wake every morning pleasantly surprised you are in my life,
I would like to feel admiration for the littlest things you do and how,
and how you look others in the eyes, openly, sparkling with affection, but so strong.
Forever is not important to me, but this is.
~
“Love is music, but it is literary, too.
Love is loneliness, an empty glass-but the glass may be empty because two lovers drank it, naked before the hot fireplace, the night before.”
~
I want you now.
I want you today.
I am willing to overlook your mistakes, if you overlook mine.
No: I will see all and you will see all and we will talk about it. Or make love about it. Or eat a meal, silently, in blinding white sunshine, avocado and sriracha on toast, with a side of greens I bought for you at the Farmers’ Market today.
It is Saturday. I could spend all day exploring your back, the nape of your neck, my tongue exploring your white teeth and wet mouth, your eyes blinking butterflies at me, your hair all messed up after you straightened it, so carefully. I don’t approve of your straightening it: I want you as close to being you as possible, because I like you.
I like you so I could read a chapter of Huck Finn to you, or Twain, or Fitzgerald, or Keraouc. I like you so I would like to hear you read to me the books you love: they are boringly foreign to me but because they come from your heart up through your throat out your lips into this world, I love them now, too. They are part of my heart, now, too.
It is tomorrow, now, we lived today so fully we tired it out.
If you asked me what I would like to do-which you do not-I would like to walk in a field of wildflowers and set up a hammock and read one of your books in it and fall asleep, the sleep of one who has worked too hard for too long and lost too much.
You know the stare of two lovers, face to face, unspeaking, fully open like flowers turned calmly up into too much sun?
I will devour you so many times you had better bring a backpack full of protection, or we will get started on future plans before we would like. You will devour me just as hungrily, if you did not this teeter totter would only totter and our match would go out. Your hunger is greater than mine, at times, our respective passions entwine, braiding up and down, when I am tired you are tiger, when I am tiger you have a small soft smile on one edge of your, open, mouth.
I would like to be with you alone, in my town, where I know everyone, and not to introduce you. I have introduced all the others and you are special and they will be able to tell.
I would like to visit you, alone, without my fickle entourage, the middle of your woods, your cabin, your table, your captain’s chairs on the porch, your favorite forest walk.
I have come to be weathered, beaten, hardened-but I stand stronger now than I ever did, I do not succumb to self-pity or weakness. How am I so strong? Because I am always content to be weak, open, raw, vulnerable. When the sea storms, I take down my sail. When the sea winds blow, I raise it again.
My expectations have been lowered by dozens of beautiful women who are right for some handsome lover, but not me. I have begun to think I sail over the horizon, alone.
My expectations have been lowered because they are too high. Meaning: I want a match, no less, and I do not find it, so I no longer expect it. So you are like an extra pint of ice cream, a welcome rain shower on a hot summer’s afternoon in Colorado, a flourish at the end of a calligraphed sentence. You are something extra that I did not and could not expect. Only: you are human.
I think of my past relationships like jenga-or like a house of cards-or like how I enjoy piling cans one atop the other in the grocery line until they’re at high as my head-eventually, it all falls down. Even if you were open, now, which you are not- we would probably not “work.” The odds are low. It’s not likely.
But she who will match me will not be a bar game, a house of cards, she will be strong, from old stock, grounded, bare feet in the forest. She will be you will be an art, not a matter of odds. Relationships are legs, beneath a short black dress relationships are glasses, hair in a bun, laughter, open mouth and white teeth and chatter with a lovely friend and tea, the mug too hot to the touch.
I would like to take the back of your neck and cradle it, relaxing it as I sit, in checkered shirt, in white rocking chair, in short shorts, in flip flops, leaning back carefully toward the old brick. This brick has stood here for 100 years, with ladies in hoop dresses and gentlemen in top hats walking by or riding by on silly bicycles or patient horses. And now teenagers with snapchat and instagram skip by, too busy for the present moment.
You would like my friends and I would like your friends and I would ignore your friends and you would ignore my friends and we would be alone together and alone, and together. Our social life would be like the seasons: too fast summer, engaged autumn, cozy winter, joyful spring. Your breasts are perfect. Your character is grounded, your character is flexible, your words precise: but precise in the playful way of good jazz, not rigid or careful.
And so I say let us start by your coming to me. We can not know if it will work but we will know that it will play, if we let it-it being out destiny, like a rippling banner unfurled in the wind.
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ~ Thomas Merton
You are not my fantasy. You are earth. You are something real. You are not a love affair: you are love. And love, I know, is friendship, lit by a match. I am your match.
We will travel around the entire world together, going to the hard to get to places, and if come out the other side then our adventure may continue.
But it begins simply, now.
Open my door. Come to me. Like two hungry tigers, we patiently wait at the edge of the jungle. There are so many animals to pounce upon but I do not want them. I want to, together with you, make a meal. Tigers don’t eat tigers-they make love to them.
I am sad, today, so sad I fear I make others sad in my path, but my sadness is not badness, it is tiredness, for you are my water, and I have traveled long, long, long in this life without you.
Are you tired for me, too?