September 19, 2007 (person)

because laughter is at least as important as forgetting;

because watching a beautiful man sleep is better than enduring a brutal man's embrace;

because gentleness is rare and gentlemen are rarer still, and combined they are an ocean breeze on raw and naked skin;

because hope trumps disappointment and takes all its chips;

because the span of his hands across the small of my back is simultaneously familiar and electric;

because of the bumping of noses and the sugar shock of open-eyed kisses;

because innocence, blind and trusting as a newborn fawn, stumbles through every barrier my heart ever mustered;

because water and fire and air and earth nestle together in the calm prism of his gaze;

because in his company twelve is a good age to feel and thirty-seven is a good age to be;

because now I know that butterflies still inhabit my tummy and all they needed was this tiny resurrection;

because no resurrection is ever tiny;

because none of this was manufactured by Detroit or Madison Avenue or even by bourbon;

because one morning with him erased nearly every lonely night;

because he is lovely and when he watches me I feel my own loveliness;

because I am absurdly and childishly pleased to be seen with a man this hot;

because he gave up precious and exciting things to spend time with me in desolate places;

because he reminds me that time is meant to be spent wantonly, liberally sauced with silliness and laced with random caresses;

because of the way my breath lodges in my chest when he glances at me sideways and squeezes my hand;

because he will not lie, even when it is prettier and easier to do so;

because he calls me by name;

because his touch is light and uncomplicated and pure as flight itself;

because he honors but refuses to tread lightly on my broken places;

because under his fingertips I trust the sacredness of my own flesh, the rush of my own blood;

because I can't breathe when he looks at me that way, which is steady and which is honest and which is stripped clean of pretense;

because he is funny and profane and his accent is chiseled out of pure New England granite;

because he is a champion navigator - he watches for stock and rocks and ice and deer - and doesn't often grab the Jesus bar even though my driving skills are abysmal;

because he lets me cry in restaurants (or anywhere else the teardrops rise to meet the healing);

because he calls my scars beautiful and means it;

because bullshit is something up with which he will not put;

because he disagrees with me on fundamental matters and agrees with me about plums;

because he thinks he doesn't understand poetry even though he is a breathing poem;

because his shoulders are broad and his legs are strong and his ass is a wonder;

because he doesn't pretend to love the outdoors but he goes there with me anyway;

because when I am with him I forget afraid I forget lonely I remember laugh I remember breathe;

because the richest morsels of summertime are meant to be devoured with such a man as this;

because he is a banquet after years of dumpster diving, a steak after scraps, wine after vinegar;

because he owns himself completely but shares himself generously;

because this is not an entanglement, this is clean-burning fuel, this is self-renewing - like springtime, like constellations, like sanity;

because - hello! - PBR in cans in a hot spring at night;

because he understands that this - this - is the living part of making a living;

because he knows when not to talk;

because being with him forces me to shower-sing terrible AM radio songs I thought I'd forgotten, and he barely teases me for being off key;

because he smells better before he showers than after;

because he reminds me what delight means, what surprise means, and that touch is not love's solitary signifier;

because I am lonelier and wealthier and more fragile and stronger now that he's gone;

because he is he and I am I and we met in the middle, in rain and in starlight;

because even if this is only what it was,

it is.