A beautiful mind

You hate the cold. 

It seeps into your bones like water into a sponge, swells you up with misery and always, always exits drip drop through your nose in the middle of the night.

Cold is a hateful thing. 

It stabs into your lungs like tiny needle teeth scrabbling for even the most tenuous of grips on your organs.  And even when you shiver, shake off the droplets of chill like a wet dog, still it clings saran-wrap style, leaves the smell of frost on your clothes and the taste of it on your tongue. 

Books speak to you, and you to them, a mutual song-language that you share, and literature says it all:  fear, a frozen tundra, barren and crisp with winter; and love, warmth, trust a molten metal in your belly.

Cold is vicious.  Its winds crawl through hidden cracks to stroke icy fingers along your frost-numb cheek.  Despite a coat, and hat, and gloves, the cold can always find a way in.

Cold is clever, too. Disguised as perfect snowflakes, it sneaks its way into your good graces. But when you are defrosting, tears streaming down your face because it hurts, you know the truth again.

You hate the cold.

It is mutual.

Leave the lights on so I can watch the day fade from your eyes. We hide under red blankets that whisper loudly of your presence when you’re gone. I remember waking up to mornings shining bright out of the mouth that leaned in to swallow me whole; into a place I was safe. Where your fingers played at the strings of my voice as though I was a guitar long out of tune. I wanted to sing for you, paint pictures of places like that tree that lost all it’s branches, but to me it looked like love. I hold out for things that are broken, I look for beauty in destruction. And I sit shaking under red blankets, hoping that if there is enough beauty in the ugly things of this world, you will be able to look at me, too, in all my nakedness, and see the love I want you to feel.

When the sky is high and the ocean is deep; when the wind is singing and the stars are sighing; when the trees are whispering secrets of life into open ears and when the soil is warming under the waking sun: these are the moments in which I know. These are the moments in which I can tell. It is the moment between the silence and the breath between the words. It is the moment when time suspends and the pencil stills and the sentences don’t flow, but rather clog and jam and fold unto themselves so that they are impossible to pick apart and understand.

These are the moments in which I know.

It is the moment when you first wake and your first motion isn’t to stretch or yawn or awaken your slumbering muscles, but rather to pull me closer into the radiating heat of your chest. It is the moment when the afternoon has stilled and the noise has muted and in the middle of the mundane normalcy you look my way and somehow turn the most ordinary of minutes into something more. It is the moment that I stretch my thoughts past the borders of myself and expand to the ends of the globe and recognise that I will never find something like it. In the heat of the desert, in the heart of the jungle, at the height of the mountains, at the depth of the sea. I can stretch the map and tear at state lines; I can gnash at equators and swallow rivers and I will never spit up another jewel as beautiful and precious as the one sitting in the middle of my palm.

It is these emotions that swell in my stomach and snap my bones so that they might grow instead. It is these emotions that rearrange my cells and create, stitch, heal something new where something broken had previously been. These emotions that warm my winter’s heart and cool my summer’s ache. They soothe my weathered soul, wipe my brow and invigorate my tongue with the promise of everlasting water.  They are the beauty of the moon and stars and the normalcy of the morning’s rays. They are ethereal and ordinary and perfect and flawed. They are everything at once so that I am praying and worshiping and falling to my knees to soak it all in.

And the moment I know is the moment I see, the moment my eyes are open so that I might finally understand the air that I breathe and the water that I drink and the sustenance that feeds my soul. The incomprehensible and the impossible and the incorrigible; the tides washing up against my veins to fuel my limbs to push me through my day. I cannot define it and I cannot explain it and the words that I spit up do naught but to outline the blurred shadow that chases it. I am incapable of showing and ineffective at describing and unwilling to give it up so that I might dissect and put it on display. So take the words and swallow and wrap your mind around the millennia of hearts beating in time with mine:

I am infatuated, I am besotted, I am smitten.

It’s nights like this that make me wish I could gnash mountains between my teeth and drain the stars from the sky. It’s nights like this that leave my limbs cold and my hands crackling so I’m on the floor trying to pick up all the pieces littered in the corners. Theoretically, if I decompose, I’ll find a way to compose myself before morning, but such a composition would never be music to the bleeding composite tongue binding around me. 

(I’m wailing on the airwaves, trying find the right frequency, but it’s hard to hear my thoughts around all the static.)

The wind is too cold for March and my heart is too frosted for the heat of this love charring all my bones. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder, but they forgot to mention that it also makes the heart cramp and ache and swell. They forgot to mention that distance maims and time cripples and you’ll be dead-exhausted swimming against the tide of wants and desires building up the shorelines around you. You’ll collapse on the sand and cough up seaweed and the soap bubbles from when you cried so hard in the shower that you swallowed the shampoo slipping down your face. 

You’ll be emaciated, you’ll be clawing at the air around you trying to tear down reality. You’ll learn to drive without seeing the road and learn to read without seeing the words and you’ll rip out your eyes, because you’ll learn they’re not useful. Don’t worry: you’ll learn to live without seeing the purpose.

Hopes are mocking and teasing and throwing the goal across the horizon before clanging the bell and expecting the race to start. The sprint. The marathon. Run. Run faster. Run longer. It’s almost there and I have to be there before time swallows itself. I have to run until my feet bleed. I have to run until my lungs balloon. I have to run for air, for peace, for home. 

— I have to run. 

Oh, I’m almost there and I’m nowhere near close enough. I’m almost there and it feels like my toe is still dragging the starting line. Don’t you know? I still catch feather light trails of your scent. I still shiver when the wind presses where your palms did. It’s enough to drag one more step and then another. I’m running and I’m almost there. Wait for me, darling. My limbs are charred from this want, but they’ll hold together for another step. My bones are sparking, but I won’t go up in flames yet. I’ll bind myself together and dam the tears, because this agony is worth it and this time is nothing but a blink if I think about it. I’m shaking, but it’s just because the wind is cold and I’m quaking, but it’s just because I’m lacking sleep. Today. I’ll run to you today. Tomorrow. I’ll run tomorrow and I’ll be there soon. The day after — I’ll run then too. 

Wait for me, Wait for me, Wait —.

Anxiety is a hummingbird in the throat of those who wait.

Palms wring oceans and pulses flood plains until time chokes on itself to leave the minutes battling on the brink of insanity. Each second is an entity that stands on its own, a demon to be fought and conquered. Each breath is a challenge, the air tangled in lungs before clacking teeth drag it forward to throw it shuddering into the wind. Heavy footprints echo fears on the walls, possibilities birthing and maturing and turning from fledgling shadows into heavy-handed fiends. 

The door remains closed. Time ticks on.

Thunder coughs in comparison to the heart roaring across the deserted field of rib-cages. Earthquakes are naught but a shrug to the desperate thrashing of imagination in the back of bruised skulls. Waiting expands, billows, an etching in a sapling blossomed into a mural on the bark of the oak. Terror of conclusions slips into the bloodstream of unrealised futures. Imagined details swell into grotesque likelihoods, the mind’s eye blinded by staring into the sun of uncertainty. 

Sunlight puddles through the open door. Time swallows itself. 

Saving grace cradles trembling jaws, murmured truths shining onto the cobwebbed shadows. Learned habits of disappointment are forgotten in the face of reconstructed trust. Endearments are merely vessels of something more, the hollow affection of years past dwarfed by the purity of quaking mouth to steadying lips. Veins untangle in the heat, rapid-fire worries curling unto themselves and ceasing to exist. Tsunamis whisper, volcanic explosions murmur, hurricanes sigh in the face of this. One look, one touch, one truth: Us.

Words on silver strings that hang from cosmic lights, dipping low into oceanic bellies late at night. They are the type of words that breathe lightly upon the back of your neck, scrape gently against the small of your back. They are the type that causes your scalp to tickle and your calves to twitch, the sound of an echo deep within your clavicle that somehow reminds you exactly of home. It’s the type of word that causes you to sit quietly on summer fields covered in winter frost because you’re worried that if you move, winter will leave you. It is the kind that presses against the back of your eyelids when you’re gently waking and tempts you for one more moment, one more second – the brush of temptation against your neck that invites you to stay cocooned in warmth.

The kind of word that I see when I turn and look at you. Ink hair pressed against your sloping forehead, doe eyes looking up at me. Centuries having eroded upon our shoulders and the word persisting onward. You inch closer and press fresh linen cheek to me so that I cannot grasp the word – I am a mute and words are meaningless drums that I have been beating for far too long. You are just a boy with peppermint lips, but you can rip apart my words with just a blink. You have a laugh that travels the radio waves and somehow eradicates the need for language. You are body language and my limbs are trembling; you are sign language and my eyes are closed. You press closer and kiss the sweep of my neck, whisper “I love you” and somehow, in the wake, leave silver words to dissolve on my tongue.

I’m staring at him, but I can’t see him. All I see is your face, carved into my mind; immune to the constant scrubbing of my memory. I’m trying to listen to him speak, but all I hear are those dreams of yours; all I hear are those secrets that you’d tell no one else.
I try to force you out of my mind, but your presence lingers. Those thoughts of you warm and hurt me all the same.
He takes my hand to hold, but it’s no good, because it’s not you. My body cringes, not knowing what to do. Not knowing that to be unfaithful, you must be together.
But it doesn’t know any better.
It pains me all the same.
But this will do, I’ll pretend he’s you and pretend that you’re pretending she’s me.
All of a sudden your dreams are his, his face is yours, and it’s your hands holding mine.
Not his, just yours.
I don’t know any better. It calms all the same.

Droplets bead along the deck as he finally turns around to look at the paper-thin boat, falling over the edge of the world in the distance. Salty spray, narrow streaks of light across blurred vision. Her candy-cane lips still fresh in his mind. Rays of orange light fan from the point on the horizon, like her hair, splayed across the sky for all to see. Droplets turn into pools as tears splash around weary ankles. The fibers of his black socks invite in the cold from the soles of his shoes.

Even the cold can’t numb a broken heart. Its pieces lay scattered across the sunburned dock, un-beating as the freezing water crawls up their sides. The railing groans under his arms, protesting first his hopeless body then his pounding fists. Screams echo across the water. Ancient rocks and calm seashells pulse with his despair.