Etherial Shrinkage

Before I met you, I was not looking for you. I was not expecting you, nor did I want you. I was preparing to batten down the hatches, taking stock for the harshest of winters. I was cold. At this time, the idea of your love was like another planet - distant, invisible, with only its periodically wobbling star wobbling to imply the planet’s existence.

I did not yet know of those eyes, dark and curious. The depths of detail and the discoveries that they would show me, if only I pay attention. I paid attention to you. I saw you, I saw something in you right from our start. I didn’t know you, yet we seemed to know each other as if only shortly apart.

Bids for connection that don’t go amiss. Arms reaching out in the night like probes testing for life. We found each other. We weren’t ready. We didn’t want love. We wanted different things. You, searching for distraction; me, searching for light in a vast emptiness. We collided.

In a wave of intense emotion and broken parts all hurtling through this absurd notion of existence without sense or art in a complete disarray with all and no expectation and the independence that we had promised ourselves before you met me and before I met you in a time where I scuttered around finding pieces of me and you scuttered about in structured stability and we cried and we moaned and we wept and we groaned as the cogs started creaking and machines starting screeching and the engines started warming with the early day morning and the stars disappearing to lay bare the days dawning where I saw you, and you saw me.

Even if our journey be short before stalling, you have shown me that love may appear without warning. We can close our door to it, in knowing vulnerability like porcelain, but knowing what I know now, I’d plunge into us over and over again. Our adventure is no longer light years away, it is now, and we can use this time to explore it.