When You Find The One You’re Meant To Be With

They’re not perfect. Far from it. But somehow, their imperfections embellish them. Stars of the night. They’re wonderful to you, so wonderful, because of all of their things. All of those annoying, bizarre, infuriatingly endearing things.

The air around you will feel lighter when they’re part of it, as if this person: skin, bones, cells, a smile, that smile, can inadvertently lift the weight of the entire world for a moment.

And they so often are part of it, the air around you. Because they want to be. You haven’t laid awake inventing intricate, romantic plot-lines to excuse their absence. You don’t know what their absence feels like; they’re there beside you, even when they’re not.

They’ve always been there, from the very first moment your eyes locked.

They will tell you that those dusty blue eyes of yours sparkle in certain light, and that your body, ‘that body’, is a work of the finest art, and on certain days you will wear your prettiest underwear and want nothing more than to be a map for their fingertips.

But even when they undress you like it’s the last time they’ll ever undress you, you’ll feel safe, sexier, in knowing that you are so much more than just ‘that body’ to them, so much more than a work of the finest art.

For you are the artist too, painting the world in the hues of their favourite colours. Creating something raw and messy and imperfect and lovely, so refreshingly lovely, together.

You might sit on a train, the morning after the evening before: the one where you danced around the living room to Beethoven, full on pizza and that giddy sense of hope that new adventures bring, and you’ll see him, vividly, in distant thought. Curled up in that big, ivory bed you chose with the fairy lights you strung tenderly around the headboard, reading that beloved book you’ve kept on your shelf for the past twenty years. Reading that beloved book to your son. He has their same long eyelashes, the same handsome freckles across the top of his nose. It’s just a warm, fleeting thought, and you’ll render it insignificant.

But it matters.

There’ll come a night when your bodies will entwine in the darkness, summer rain hammering on the windows in that uncompromising way it does sometimes, and you’ll peel your cheek from their clammy chest and you’ll whisper, quietly, shyly, perhaps, something about ‘home’. How the definition of that word is no longer bricks and mortar, or the kitchen in which you’d lick bowl after bowl of sugary cake mix as a child, but skin.

Bones. Cells. A smile. That smile.

Home. An anchor in the storm. A reference point. An always, for always.

That’s what it feels like, when you get it right, when you give yourself to the person who deserves you. And I think, perhaps,

that it could be the most spectacular
and most terrifying thing
that any human could feel.