[writing] one day, someone will make me feel like this;
It begins with the rush, that quickening in the blood that finds us in a room, dimly lit, flushed with need until I tell you that I am scared, that I have never done this before, stammering all the while that I may bluff but that is all it ever is. You quiet me with that look in your eyes, the same one you gave me when you turned your face to kiss the palm of the hand that I had raised to your cheek. You tell me to relax and I do, lean my head backwards against your shoulder, let my fingers flutter over your knuckles as you smooth your palm over my stomach.
I have been held before. I have been held like this and I have missed it, this feeling of being small and soft, a flower hidden in the shade of a rock. I relish it, for even flowers forget their softness when they stand among their own. Even roses forget that they have thorns, that their stems are hard, because all people seem to notice is the velvet of their petals and how brushing it along the apple of their cheek is the ghost of a lover's lips.
I breathe deep when I feel your breath against my neck, suddenly aware how cool the strands of my hair feel as they settle against my skin. I close my eyes when you whisper, when your arm comes about my waist, drawing me up against you, my back to your chest. The room is cold, I think, but you are warm - no, not warm - you are the fireplace I sat infront of when Baguio was still cold in December and I was young and foolish enough to think that I might wake up to see snow.
You ask me what I'm thinking of and I smile. I tell you that I am remembering my favorite book, where the mother of the heroine told the man she loved that it was his warmth, his heat that tied her to him because she was always, always so cold. I tell you I am thinking of that day we spent in the mountain springs and I feel your smile upon my shoulder.
I had hidden in the water that day, feeling more safe in the liquid cold than out in the air and the sun. When I tried to slip away you called me a mermaid and caught me by my waist, asking why I shied away from your touch. I tell you now that I remember the myths, the ones about the spirits of water and air, how they took the shapes of the animals they favored and loved - the seals, the fish, the swans - whether in part or as a whole.
I tell you that I think often on how it is always one capturing the other, how one is hunted, the other the hunter. That I ask myself quietly why that is, why in the end it is always the same: the spirit leaves, escaping back to its world, and the man or woman is left to die of a broken heart while their children wander the earth, mortal and strange.
It is a metaphor, I think. I tell you this. A warning to those who would seek out that one great love, a caution that tells us that if we find it and lose it as we are all meant to lose things, nothing will ever be the same.
It is here that you ask if I will leave you one day and your question is lost in my hair. I do not tell you that I see endings even before things begin, for others have taught me the meaning of goodbye. I do not say that I believe that it is you who will leave and not I.
I want to tell you that unlike the myths, I do not feel as if you withhold my pelt, my coat of feathers, thus preventing my return; that I know not of a primal need to return to the sea as I am happy here on land and have long-since taught myself to breathe. I want to tell you that I am as skin and bone and human as you - immortal only when you kiss me, when you smile, your hand coming over mine; when you let me go or let me lead, the path of my shadow followed only by your eyes.
Instead I turn to you, let my forehead rest against yours before my teeth catch on your bottom lip so that your breath hitches and I inhale. We are both breathless when you say my name, the sound of it a command I cannot help but follow, and when I lift my gaze to catch a glimpse of the dark that has crept into your eyes I know, finally what it is that calls the sea-faeries back to the deep.
I suppose I should hate how infatuation gives me a brazen sort of courage to just write what feels lovely. My metaphors are all over the place and it probably doesn't flow as sweetly as it should, but damn, I am inlove with this and Will continue to be inlove with this even if it never sees more than this little patch of day. :)