When you are around, I am full to the brim. I feel full of innocent laughter and dirty laughter. Sexual, teasing, clumsy, powerful, unintentional, intentional. Joy, a banner with rivets, to hang excitement or calm upon. The flow of a river – slow bubbling inlets and vortex waterfalls – endlessly renewing. I feel full of life jackets, like strong arms enclosing my tender heart, arms maybe made of steel, arrows hitting them and clattering away without dent, but – not steel, because they are buoyant, light, allow movement, smush down to get through small spaces, always inside me and around me. I feel full of decadent healthy choices, chocolate on chocolate and the fresh scent of cucumber, fragrances of herbs and wind, the solid familiarity of home smells when returning from a journey, strawberries straight from the garden, and your bodily smells, human, sweat and wetness and remnants of my own hormones reflected as I bury my nose in your shoulder. I walk with you more miles than I walk without you, and I sit with you for hours in georgeous laziness, still and never still. I feel full of men and women, and people who refuse to pick a side, refusal of the existence of sides, refusal of rules but high honor given to boundaries. The existence of a world, city streets laid out like a toy set with tiny figurines before us, but not of plastic, its material is respect; an amorphous world, moving like a kaleidescope, emotions and experiences as visible as the physical, a city practical and surreal at once, deeply weird, with a unity of structure that implies only nature and very little of the frontal lobe. Something we two can analyze, but which we also parody, laugh at, sing of, and accept without explanation. I feel full of color. To say rainbow is to imply something linear and with borders, so abandon that thought. But rainbow, rain and bow - of bow ties and dancing naked in a downpour, of pride and being yourself and finding your people, finding your ability to choose, finding your confidence, letting color explode outward from your heart, hearing music and feeling tears well up within you, watching those around you fall out of balance but remaining in it yourself, gently tugging them by the hand or having to let go, crispness and gradients, pillows and lines in the sand, red jazz and blue pointy twangs, a green organic pop synth, if this is rainbow, then I feel full of rainbow. I feel full of your sight. You see me. So genuinely and closely, you look. You ask to know me. The first time, I hesitated. Several years ago in a foreign country, in an adult foreign language class, lost, inarticulate for the first time in my conscious life, insecure beyond what I’d ever expected, I learned the importance of questions, and what it means to begin from the bottom up. It had been easy to preach confidence when I always had something to feel confident about. Easy to depend on reported evidence, and easy to depend on language. Suddenly made into a child, an unseen and unheard child, my personal epistemology was turned, literally, on its head. My heart on top, I discovered truth resided there, first. In time I learn to go beyond talk. In time I learn to paint pictures with my ears. Listen with my whole body. Ask with my eyes. Say more with five words than with fifty. Say fifty when I can paint with them. You asked to know me. I have been replying yes, please, since we met. I have been asking you and hearing your answers since we met. I feel full of your yes, please. I feel full of verbs, full of flexing of new muscles. Full of "I learn." Jogging through grass and bouncing along pavement and trudging through snow. Trying skis. Trying skates. Trying dance. To reach my full potential, to reach your full potential, to reach our full potential, to be fulfilled: this is a verb, a choice to act, and also a state of being, an attitude to embody, and also a place, the place where I smooth the wrinkles in your forehead and you wrap me in safety, and also a goal, for the process requires a further desire, a longer arm stretch, a future of flexing. Being fulfilled requires something left unfulfilled. We are all that and more. I am full to the brim, yet I have room. I am full to the brim, yet I have no brim - I am everything else and you, too.
