I loved her accent and the upper curve of her upper lip. I loved whenever she spoke about her favorite plays. When I say I fell in love with Shakespeare that summer, I partly mean to say I fell in love with her. Talking to her was like switching from math to poetry. It felt like I was using a different part of my brain. We had a different language for everything we felt. During the midsummer nights I learned how to read the lines on her face, how to trace her calloused fingertips, how to speak the words that had turned to rust on my tongue. The first time I stepped into her room my insides shriveled and sank. I studied her bookshelves to make up for the fact I couldnāt look her in the eye. But under the harsh fluorescent light, my hand made its way to hers and fell into her palm like dust. I asked her to read to me and soon became lost in the river of her words. Her body, then, starting with the vibration of her vocal cords, was poetry incarnate. Like a light too bright, we ended each night like a verse, always with the promise of more. When we first made love, I didnāt know how to stop apologizingāonce for every lustful gaze, twice for every squirming touch. But under the instruction of her sighs, I was an avid learnerāhow to unhook, untie, unhinge. How to crave and not apologize for it. It took me a long time to love my body. Now I was learning to love another. And as I awoke to the smell of jasmine and filtered morning sunlight, I also learned that she was not, in fact, poetry incarnate. She was not the softness I mistook her for. Beneath her skin she was igneous rock, and boiling lava beneath that. She was hot-blooded and limbs and desire. Though her name tingled like sugar dissolving on my lips, I knew she was the sea in a storm and I was terrified of taking on water.
(via typewriterdaily)
Oh my god.Ā
