I hope he wouldn't mind that I think of him this way. I think he would understand, though. I think if we met, our souls would recognize each other. Oh, it's you, mine would say to his. The one whose shadow I slipped through in the last life. You have colored my core since that moment, one in a million millenia.
I know you, his would say to mine. The one whose light flickered past me in the last life. I have searched for it since that moment, the spark in a sea of static silence. Our souls would talk to each other while our fingers pressed together and remembered. If our eyes met, I wouldn't swallow my tears. To hear his voice layered over and under mine...the colliding cadences of our two selves melding into one. I would not breathe.
●●●●
I would love you. You don't understand. You think no one will ever love you. Who told you that? You think you are unlovable. Who put that in your heart? Who twisted it so deeply into your wounds that it tangled with your capillaries and now swells gently with your breath, heaves with the beat of your pulse? There is a clarity in you that others recognize. Your gaze is pensive, your vision deep; you have seen worlds crumble. I think one of them was yours. You know you are strong. You know you are tender. This certainty of yourself, maybe that is the power drawn in the elegant lines of your face. Maybe it is what allows you to answer others with grace, to move like the eye of a storm, to laugh like a kid on a tire swing. You smile, and I mirror you without really knowing. It just happens.
Your hands look like Michaleangelo sketched them in charcoal pencil. I wish I could kiss your fingers softly, at the place where they bend when you play your guitar. I wish I could press my thumb into your palm and feel the lines of time and human nature and music and sorrow and rebirth. Your face is God's best evidence; no less than a divinity could have carved your refined jawline, smoothed the gentle craters of your cheekbones, drawn the graceful curve of your eyes and pout of your lips. I'd trace the flawless shape of your nose with kisses, count the little freckles on your forehead, your cheek, your chin. Your skin is like honey in the sun. Can I bury my hands in your hair, dark curls spiraling around my fingers? Can I hold your head between my palms, feeling your warmth, the sacred structure of your bones? I wish I could describe your eyes. They are brown and they are beautiful.
We'd hold each other. We would laugh together, mostly, at each other and ourselves and the joy that doesn't make any sense. And for you to lay your head in my lap and cry would be the best pain I could ask for. For you to wipe my tears with your sleeve would be bliss worth any sorrow. Both of us, at night, warm from our showers and full from our dinner we made together, fuzzy and sleepy and glowing in dim lamplight. My head on your chest, the precious pressure of your arm on my back. In sleep, my hand cradles yours. In sleep, we move together and sigh, dreaming, until sunlight stains the walls golden.
I love you. You don't understand.
But maybe one day.
