It Feels Like I’ve Loved You For A Long Time

It’s been 71 days and my love for you is still growing.

I can tell it will continue to grow. It’s been 71 days, but it’s felt like a hundred and fifty. I still can’t believe how short the period is we’ve been together because it’s felt like months and months and months of being with you, learning with you, being loved by you.

Perhaps time will catch up with how we really feel and the 150 days I feel like I’ve already spent with you on this 71st day will finally arrive. If so, I hope on that 150th day I will feel as if I have spent 300 days with you, thus forcing time to catch up with us again. I hope it will keep trying to gain on us yet never actually do. Like a game of cat and mouse – we will be elusive. For once, Father Time will not slip through our fingers. We will slip through his.

But they say that the brighter the fire burns the faster it turns to dust. Lord knows we started a bush fire exactly 35 days after our eyes first locked across the table when you told me that funny story about the girl who kissed your lips before I did. So baby, please, keep adding fuel to the fire and keep planting trees to make sure this love forest never burns out.

Because I don’t want this to be another mistake. I don’t want us to make cautionary tales out of each other. I don’t want to be scorched to cinders by heartbreak anymore.

Instead I want you to hold my hand as we choke on the fumes of our bush fire while we continue to feed it until it blazes big. The flames will keep licking at our feet, forever burning hot on our skin. And maybe someday we will learn how to breathe with smoke in our lungs, and I will have stopped trying to keep track of time.

***

Pill Head

My friends complain
why I still talk about you
as often as my palms cramp
from writing about you so much.

You burned your name
into my throat
the first time our tongues
touched, your lungs
breathed
words into mine.

You’re in my veins now
no matter how hard
I try to choke you out,
your aftertaste
still lingers
in my mouth.

I think I can
never drain you out of my system.

(You’re all I ever think about)