“This house is on fire
Burning the tears right off my face
What the hell did we do?
Tell me we’ll make it through
Cuz you made it easy
You make it easy
To love you babe”
– Easy, by Troye Sivan (modified by me)
Feeling love is hard for me to do, because I hated myself for so long.
My mind says, “This can’t be happening” all the while falling for her.
Because she loves me. So I want to protect her. I don’t want to think that anything bad can ever happen to her. When she crystallizes into being in front of me. There she is. A lover, in the truest sense of the word, the most complete sense.
At night, in the still darkness beside me, I feel her breathe and it makes the bed feel like home. An eternity of warm nightness, brilliant lightlessness, her energy radiating into my heart and healing it by her presence.
In the army surplus store in Arvada, looking at knives and boots and Carhartt hoodies, dusty rose. She is my dusty rose. The smell of her cheek gives life to a part of me I didn’t even know existed.
So I take her to my favorite breakfast burrito place, but curse these stupid roundabouts because they’re making her sick, so I want to cure her. I reach back into all of the medical videos I’ve watched on youtube and pull out some shred of knowledge, half-baked in the hopes of my fucking problem-solving computer person brain, all archives and algorithms and patterns and architecture and I can’t solve it.
So I hug and I kiss her and it feels fucking amazing, and I fight to try to learn to be a human being again, somehow, after decades of lost humanity and sealed suburban lawn maintenance.
Over here are the chemicals I use to kill the dandelions on my lawn so I won’t get fined by the homeowners association that will probably give me leukemia but I have to appear to be the pleasant but athletic man in the childless couple on the corner who cares if I get cancer? Will anyone remember?
She will.
I am glad to not be that man any longer, now I want to be her woman and nothing else matters.
So we cure each other’s cancer with nights and alternate weekends in bed or working on our laptops in the house. I text her from upstairs, “I love you so fucking much come kiss me in the five minutes before my next conference call.”
And I melt when she does.
And the heart opens up like milkweed in the late fall on the trail in the sun, the water of my soul coursing in the creekbed below her, where I kiss her upper thigh in the hip that I worry might hurt too much and I want it to be OK too.
Curse this fucking Denver asteroid belt that separates us. Time and space have no meaning here. Only entropy running in reverse, making me look younger as I learn what joy is.
