Photograph

There’s a picture of me looking at you. You took it at my request, and I didn’t tell you why at the time...it wasn’t about the grand background or the sea or sky or anything, It was about me looking at you. I wanted to remember how this feels inside. That wide-eyed wanderer who falls in love in a breath, and leaves just as quickly before anything can become real.

I had tried to leave that wanderer’s soul behind. Fill her full of responsibilities and work and told her she had

to grow up. I thought I was saving myself, but it turns out I was only drowning the me I needed to be all along.Life’s march of tragedies stripped all manner of pretense so I got on a plane and ran away for a while. 

I climbed, explored, discovered and felt. The ocean. A glacier. Lava running like a river.

Then you. I don’t know how or why, but inside, I heard you. Quiet at first. A whisper that felt like “I see you” followed by a cascade of you I never expected because I thought those parts of me were gone with the wanderer...I closed my eyes and let that feeling wash over me. Bathed in it a while, and I don’t think it’s anything you did, but who you are. What you bring to yourself and the world you’ve built around you. The picture of you you paint. You curate. 

There’s beauty there. Real beauty. A quiet eternity, waiting for something. A voice in the dark, maybe. A whisper between your thoughts. Like me.

But I wasn’t built to stay. 

I can still hear you now and again. More distant and a little harder to hear, but you're here. And I want you to stay. Not with promise or expectation, or the kinds of things that overturn lives. Just the quiet of you with the quiet of me.