Freckles
When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.
“
“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we’ve found each other. And maybe each time, we’ve been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”
This bullet is going to land home. I’m going to lay my hands on you, and the world as we knew it; is going to go down in flames.
And we will fuck like it’s the last night on earth, every night, until it is.
Hands scrabble at backs, and you press your body against mine in a flounder. It’s the messy hugs that I love the best, because they’re the true ones. Where coordination goes out of the window in favour of fervour, just grabbing at one another because right now is too slow, and you need to be in my arms a moment ago, an hour ago, always.
The messy embraces are the ones that let me know that this is real. Life colours outside of the lines, with all the enthusiasm of a toddler, and fiction can’t stand to have those untidy, frayed edges leaking out all over the place. It needs order, where life is chaos. The mess is necessary. The mess is life. The failed high five, completely missing the mark. Missing the seat and falling on your arse. Trying to kiss me and bumping teeth. Beautiful little moments, a million little mistakes, each one making the reality of it all come crashing in on me, a hairline fracture on the window, before the water comes bursting through.
The mess lets me know you care more about the action than the execution, and that’s a powerful bit of knowledge. To clamour for me with such beautiful desperation is more than humbling, the kind of feeling that makes me know that yes, this is exactly why I want to be the person that I am, and do the things that I do. Desperate hands clawing at faces. Fingertips on smile lines.
