I can feel it when I kiss him – the love, the last 4 years, me in Astoria holding on to a pillow that smelt like him and thanking the universe for his existence. And then I think about all the things that happened between then and this empty cup we hope refills itself. In love with each other for all the same reasons that keep us at arms length. And of all the things I’ve made sense of in my life, this is not one of them: how two people can love each other so deeply and still not know how to connect the dots; intimacy, to communication, to finances, to dirty dishes. Love alone does not sustain a life together. When I say left he says he prefers right and we go in circles around one another, reaching and retracting on a mood leftover from the argument before this one. Dizzy, drained, disillusioned.

-tbrumm

I can feel him in a room before I see him. But once I do, once our eyes find one another’s, I swear there’s an electric current jumpstarting every nerve in my body. We don’t make sense, but we make fire, and electricity, and all other things that light up the dark, that take you from simmering to boiling over.

-tbrumm

I haven’t been that close, physically or emotionally, in years. A decade in comparison. You forget the way your mind goes blank, the way – nose to nose and smile to smile – the world disappears around you. You forget how it feels to be wanted, to be met with “show me more” instead of “be less”. So you wring yourself out thinking you can extract wanting to be wanted drip by drip, hang drying until you crack, sure that if you could drown once more that’d be enough. But they leave their taste in your mouth, the shape of their body imprinted in your memory, the smell of their hair coming back to you on every humid day since and that part of yourself that you kept hidden for the last 10 years starts clawing at the surface begging to be seen, be heard, be healed.

-tbrumm