It’s the way your eyes flicker like candle light under the seas of blankets we’ve started to call home, almost like a dream waiting just waiting to be conjured up by my imagination. It’s the way your too-pale skin still looks so much more beautiful under my fingers, freckles threatening to spill over onto my thumbs, because your thighs can hold no more. It’s the way you hum to birds outside the wide windows who cannot hear you but still turn their heads, as if to say yes, the world is a beautiful place, because they get to share it with you. It’s the way your bare feet are never going to be completely free of dirt ever again because even shoes cannot contain you. It’s about your deep and rich laughs, which can only mean I have done something right or incredibly wrong, but it’s okay because you expect that from me. It’s the way your hands don’t succumb to the nervous twitches from anxiety or sadness or pain, constantly steady, though not ever warm, not even in the middle of July. It’s the way you sometimes trace unnamed faces into tables and desks and chairs, like long lost friends you wish you could see one last time. It’s the way you can transform your own sadness into determination, almost as a challenge to yourself that sadness will not do, and cannot do, anything for you. It’s the way your soft looks fill my heart with something that I cannot contain but I do not know how to let go of — my heart beating so fast, I swear it may take flight. But mostly it’s the quiet voice you use to tell me those three simple words that I will always need to hear.
I am here.
