Jonas

"To love you calmly is not to love you at all."-- Jeanette Winterson

I woke to the skies upending a thousand salt shakers onto New York.

In the fluorescent glare of an iPhone screen against the semi-dark room I open our message thread, my fingers tapping a Braille they learnt from all the nights spent wound between yours. I cradle your name like a cool stone blessing in my mouth and sigh, shifting, the covers an unending valley of cotton folds and shadows breaking across body and bed. 

Outside my window the blizzard is wearing itself out, the wind dying. These are the storms that we've spent whole adolescences bracing ourselves for-- yet even till now I am still learning how to navigate my body through people and place, first encounters, second chances, third charms, never agains. I have bruised my knees praying under so many half-moons. I have singed nearly all my fingers chasing moths into the fire. I scale the topography of your body and lose my way in the sine curve of your bones, trying to find a true north that they tell me no longer exists. 

Why do we understand love only by disqualification? 

Perhaps the half-life of love need not be forever. Perhaps it is enough, simply, for it to be courage.