do you know how I feel

cause I don't think you know how I feel


You know how sometimes when you are standing on something tall, a bridge, say, or a dam? You are standing up there and suddenly you become afraid of things that you are not normally afraid of. My keys. Where are my keys? What if I drop my keys? Where is my phone? Am I too close? Because even though I am a good three feet from the edge, I am afraid that somehow maybe my knees will buckle and I will go over, even though my knees have never gone out from under me with no warning before. Or you feel that compulsion to step off. You don't know why, you just feel it, even though you know it will kill you. My favorite part about that is that sometimes I wonder if I have actually done it and I just don't know it yet. That maybe, even though I am standing there safely, I am actually two seconds ahead of myself and my brain will catch up soon. It is an odd feeling.

This is how I feel when I am with you. When I see you. When I hear you talk or even just, sometimes, when I see your handwriting. Your initials are everywhere. I see you, everywhere. But when I am with you, when I'm standing right in front of you, sometimes I feel that way. I have to ask myself if I am in fact still standing in front of you or has it happened? Are you still speaking or do I, do I, perhaps, already know the weight of your throat? Because sometimes it is so real, it feels like it has happened and that it's already done, even though I know it hasn't. Because when I'm with you it is always right, it's always true, and I believe it. I believe it the way I believe in the sun, the way I believe in my legs, and this is how I recognize you, because you are the smell of water, you are the sound of my own name, and this is how you move me. You are different than I am, but you are the things that I know. You're tall and I am not. You're thin and I am not. You're a lot of things that I am not but you sing when I sing, I see you seeing and I want you, I don't want all of you but enough to make you recognize and acknowledge, I want your limbs to remember me, I want to know that you know and I want to hold your face and see your tattoos against my plain, plain skin. But I will never tell you, because you are a test. I will never tell you because where you are the sun I am the ocean, and the ocean does not speak to the sun. It takes its heat and reflects its light but it does not touch it, ever. Not even on the horizon, where it looks and feels like the most natural thing in the world, and if the sun were to crash into the ocean it would be the end of everything. You're a test. The universe put you in my way to test me, to see if I could accept a gift of something good without destroying it. And I can. And I will. It will be my gift back to the world, and to you, and to me. My gift to you is to never make you responsible for knowledge you did not ask for, and then I will never have to not feel this way. And that will be my gift to myself.