I Have Always Loved You

He is driving up in his ebony car.
The headlight flickers and I’m trying not to cry.
I can taste my own anticipation.
Everything is on fire and the whole world is mad,
spinning.
I realize how long it has been since I’ve stood barefoot,
waiting.
I am falling over and standing back up,
again
and again.

“You’re here. I can’t believe you’re here.”

And I’m there, tangled up in him again,
and the world is on fire. He hugs me like he’s afraid to let go. I’m afraid of him letting go. It has been so many months. His hair is longer and his eyes are tired.
He picks me up and it’s like I’m thirteen,
and I’ve never felt like this,
never seen a sight so devastatingly beautiful.
That he has me spitting out every cliche,
I am weak in the knees and carving our names in the nearby Oak trees.
Our love,
Evergreen.

He is back and we are here. We weave our way through streets with low lights and “deer crossing” signs. I tell him I will draw us a map to find a way back. We have been away so long, what if we forgot? And he makes a joke, as he does. I connect each freckle like dots that will retell the memories we both tried to forget. He lifts up my shirt and kisses my belly button, says I changed my ring. “It’s pink now.” I changed it last week. I tell him. “Green Eyes, you’re still my Green Eyes.”

He finds lilac honeysuckles and says they taste good. I say that’s gross and maybe they are poisonous and we don’t know much of anything. He agrees. He sticks it in his mouth and kisses me with flowers between his teeth. I push him down onto the grass and it’s everything.

It’s everything,
I missed,
everything I tried to find.
Everything I knew I couldn’t.

“Life without you isn’t much of a life at all. It feels blurry and on pause and I can never taste my favorite foods. I can’t taste much of anything.”

I guess I fell in love,
but never really out.
And he leans over,
sings me that stupid song,
the cicadas play accompaniment.

“The way you look, tonight.”

And we are one.