“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”  ~ F. Scott. Fitzgerald

~

I want to feel it all today—with you.

The fire of our beginning and the burn of our ending.

I find myself counting up the years we could have together and wishing that we had met a century or two ago so I could look into the future and not see a horizon.

Centuries with you don’t scare me but horizons do, even if it is bathed in the sweetest sunset I have ever seen. You are the sun that spreads itself across the sky in brilliant hues of amber and vermilion, filling my eyes with impossible dreams.

You are the inconceivable made real, the rise of a flock of sparrows into a cerulean sky.

In the beauty of your love, there has been an awakening of my soul. That which has been born within me now feeds the moments of each day we share. It is the manna for the hungry, an artesian well hidden in the dusty Sahara.

I want to feel it all today, the ache of being apart, the searing anticipation of being together, the insecurities that haunt me—the fire that singes the corners of my being.

I want to feel what it would be like to watch you walk away. It’s not the ranting of madness, it’s the allowing space for whatever will be, and loving you through every motion of the wheel that spins us together.

I would like to know what it would be like to hold your hand when it is wrinkled and soft because we’ve grown into wise old souls, and to know that your hand would still be in mine while I draw my last breath.

I would like to drown in the youth of your body as it is now and offer you mine and for what are just seconds in the face of eternity. I want to draw every ounce of passion from your skin. I would like to paint the essence of my rawness onto you like a tattoo. I would like to wear you also.

Today I feel the intensity of when we were not yet, and what is now, and ours no more. It is all beautiful in its own way. It is all a part of what makes us real.

If you were a painting you would be a Monet, a garden made of my own inspiration, my own impressions, a symphony of colors that translated onto canvas was only a shadow of the depth of my feelings—because those I could not share wholly with the world—some things are only for you and me.

I want to feel it all today, what makes us and what unmakes us, what is real and what is soaked in fear, the shadow lands and the fullness of the moon on our faces.

Our love appeared as an approaching wave, a mirage of aquamarine and frothy whites. It threatened to drown me, then, cocooning me in the sanctuary of its belly, offered respite from the years of searching for you.

“And then there was you,” is how I begin the stories that I recount to myself at night when I want to remember how we started. You found me. Today I want to feel again what it was like before there was you—it’s becoming difficult to remember that me.

Before there was you there was a space in my heart that waited.

When there was you, I unfolded my wings and testing their strength, leapt from the edge of what was known into the abyss. I’m still on the wing—flying an uncharted course. But, that is all I ever really wanted—to be free even as I was the taken.

I want to feel it all today. Your kiss, your smile, your words as they caress me.

On this journey, I would like to know you as a wolf knows the call of its pack, to be embraced, to be lonely, to be the huntress and the hunted—to be consumed.

Today, we are the dawn, one day we will be the dusk.

I want to feel it all. With you.

~

Author: Monika Carless
Image: Audrey Reid
Editor: Lieselle Davidson
Copy Editor: Sara Kärpänen
Social Editor: Callie Rushton