I didn't know until tonight how you saying my name would unravel me, bring a small, soft sound from the back of my throat, a sound somewhere halfway between pleasure and pain, in that place where desire resides like Christ's own tide. I think in that moment, for just a moment, I understood what “longing” was... I thought I’d known before. How foolish I've been.
The wind yesterday beckoned you from your car and begged you to sit, shielded by that place where you go to worship, and watch from your shelter as the trees swayed, dancing with the wind in their ageless love affair, sky and land, never together, always touching. In those moments, you prayed. The wind was full of promise and promises. You told me that you wished me with you... I wish instead that you’d felt me with you. Because, with wind, I am carried to you always. If it touches your face, than it touches mine. If you see the clouds, swift and racing, than I am with you. The sky is big. The Earth is small. And space and time... I’m not so much bound by those. Not since I met you.
I told you once that I don't want a harbor. That I liked you unsafe -- wild and changeable and my own for as long as *you* see fit. That I turn to you as my perfect storm when the rest of the world is removed from me and so, alone, I am safe. You call me your danger addict and you know I court trouble. How telling that that's what Bobbi calls you. And I suppose I cannot escape the addict tag, though addict implies I could live without storm, tempest, speed and fight. Addict implies I might reform if I tried hard enough, wanted it badly enough. But there is only one thing I want badly and it isn’t safety.
You are unexpected, uncompromising, surprising, shocking, bold... you are half a hundred things that no one else assumes you are and that always catch my breath and force me to remake my image of you. Willingly. Breathlessly. Perfectly.
You are sweet spring dawns and hot summer nights. You are articulate passion and the folds of flowers in my hands. You are stormy eyes and thoughtful pauses. Artful conversation while you sort things out with our Christ. You are impossible to categorize. You are impervious to casual avoidance. You are everything a storm should be. Changer and changed. You say “never” and mean only “not now.”
In this world that I keep at a distance, that I balance out on scales of responsibility, creativity and shades of truth, you alone touch me. You alone breathe wonder and possibility into me. In my world of a hundred names, a half dozen resumes, a quarter gross of roles to play, you have found the secret key to the lock. You have swung open the heavy door, dressed in your royal finery like medieval cosplay, and you have found me... the real me, the simple me... just standing there. Gazing up at you. As though I’ve been waiting.
Christ is the reason I must open my eyes every morning... but you are the reason I actually do it.
EJ
