From me to you

25.01.17

Dear you,

It feels important that I write. My head is so full of words – stuffy with sentences and overflowing. I have come to realise that language only exists between individuals, that words have meaning only when they are flung between people. That words can penetrate bone, lodging themselves in the spongy mass of nerve tissue that bounces around inside our skulls. That words can entangle two brains. Our love is not cardiac, but cerebral.

You are the only person I can talk to about my latest linguistic discoveries, those verbal specimens captured from the wilderness, those inky creatures hunted down amongst the leaves of books – that I tame and coax into sentences, before releasing back into the open, letters on a page or syllables pushed between lips. They are tricky and slithery and even now I can feel them slipping through my

But this is more than words. This is more than fiction. This moment isn’t a story and you are more than three syllables on the tip of my tongue. You are ineffably you. Infinitely complex, impossibly fascinating, constantly transcendent. You are a multifaceted mystery I will never solve and I love your whole soul, from your head to your toes.

We were young and shiny when we met; newly made and unsure of ourselves. Not yet hardened or dulled by the tragedy of living – still soft and squishy, elastic, porous. And that was when life exploded and took us both with it. Expanding rapidly outwards and picking up all the weeks, months and years in its path. I try to catch hold of the moments as they rush past me, melting into memory, but we keep moving faster and faster and faster and I’m just dizzy and breathless and empty-handed. Your arrival was life coming into focus and now the colours are so vivid and sharp that they ache behind my eyes.

We’re here for the ride; you and me, here at the helm of time itself. And whilst I flounder through the diurnal chaos that churns around me, something stops me from peeling off into the abyss. It’s you that I cling to, white-knuckled. I am tied to you by a million strings; you are my anchor.

Your eyes are seawater, muddled and obscure – not quite brown and not quite green, possessing that indefinable quality of something in between. I miss being so close that I can see my reflection in the sloping, dusky whorl of your iris – another me staring up from underwater, like I’m about to reach that brimming surface and burst through it into another dimension. Those glassy balls, limpid and liminal, seem to throb with an infinitude of vesperal suspense, a glittering gloaming. Part of me crossed over long ago.

I miss being completely wrapped up in you, our bodies tied up in knots. I miss the taste of your smile. I miss the feeling of your hair tickling my face, the feeling of your lips on mine when they’re a little dry and cracked.

You made me realise life was worth living.

Before I go, I’d just like to thank the stars that erupted to make you and that live on in the lining of your skin. Because you, my logophile, my love.

You are radiant.

Me