"Always" is a big promise, but I know how to keep it
I think I fell in love with you, once, years ago, in city slums dark and sepia-toned, now pale, foggy past. I loved you with bloody knuckles and less bucks to my name than you had healthy days to yours. I didn't know that love was what this was, at the time. This twist in my gut, the blossom of faith in my chest at your fool's gold smile was just that. Nothing definable, merely a feeling of knowing. Your death wishes, requested through enlistment forms, trying to upend it all -- not that there was much to begin with, besides starlit teeth and fluttering hope -- chipped at my soul. I imagined slivers of translucent silk floating through my body, placeless, that glued themselves back together when none of your attempts worked. Departure made me a moon during a lunar eclipse, the great big shape of the world coming between us leaving me lightless without my Sun.
I didn't want to tell you I fell in love with you, decades ago, in a merciless forest. With trench mud impossibly working its way under nails bitten blunt, and smoke in the air so constant our lungs got used to the heavy weight, and stopped treating each inhale like a shuddering burden, but carried the breaths I held for you like Atlas does the sky. Eternally. I loved you in stale, green tents and the clink of dog tags possessive, terrified when you got close enough in laughter for me to taste the useless coffee on your exhalations. Blood turns to ice when it doesn't have anything to warm it, and every night we spent curled in parentheses, the chilled space between us hardened my sinews until they were only stone. Burying a treasure, the only one I had left, my ruby heart waiting for you to find it, because it had always belonged to you.
I know when I fell, in love, it was definitely for you, lifetimes ago, caught only by the wrong hands and mountain snow. For you, and the everlasting instinct to protect you to the ends of the Earth, and I did, by God I did. With the exception of your own stupid courage, I saved you from everything the universe seemed Hell-bent on throwing your way. Even from myself and the monster I felt growing within, both the heat in my eyes and the poison in my veins. I tried not to feel grateful for release from the torture that had been ravaging my body, when the ravine took me, when your face was a disappearing supernova above me, pulsing red, white and blue. At least I knew love, the passion-stoked flame of it in me. If only it was enough to keep me warm for the the era of cold war that was about to dawn.
I have fallen in love with you, for centuries, with every version of me. Perhaps it is because each form I have taken has been a soldier, and you are the order. Giving structure, giving meaning. Brooklyn, Breitenau, Berlin, Barcelona, Bangkok, Burma. Our lives have been mapped in battlefields so numerous it is impossible to tell where the cartographer war lord placed the nib of his pen first. So many wars I forget what we're fighting for, at this point. (To go home, you whisper, in an airport about to become collateral carnage). I think about that word for a long time. When everything catches fire, and I am about to follow you into another fight, and you give up a hero's worth of nobility for my miserable sake, I think about home, and how it has only ever been you, but right now I am more lost than ever. No atlas, no map, no bread crumbs to lead me back to your heart.
I want to keep falling in love with you, for eons to come, but I'm not sure how to any longer. I worry that the skeletons in my closet took that ability from me, or shattered it so its pieces are drifting, ghostly, inside, like the remains of my mind and memory. All of me is more broken glass than whole crystal, and you and your reckless bravery -- you never did know what's good for you, you punk -- keep getting cut on my sharp edges. The only thing motivating me to stop bleeding all over this rekindled love story of ours is that immortal desire to see you safe, secure from all hurt, especially the kind I have and do and will induce. So I bandage my wounds, and I remember that love is blind. (I can forget a lot of things, but not my love for you, even if I am struggling to find my way back to it). I can't read the cartographer's cruel drawings any more, but I can follow the hummingbird vibrations of my ribs to echo-locate my way to you. And the miracle is, your arms are there, to welcome me back into your embrace.
