Old With Want

I’ve been seeing more of a friend. Not like I’d meant to, only like she stepped into my field of view and said “here I am,” while I was looking at big posters of her, and little remembrances of scary things that’d happened in the past, and weighing so heavily all the things that weren’t her. She stepped up, I asked, and she pulled me through with her lips.
Through to a clearer reality, where we see each other not for what we think, but for what we are shown, and for what we experience together.
She came into view not a whole person or a whole impression in an instance. I had stopped looking at her -I remember. She came in first as eyes, then as a collar bone. I notice this small thing, then that, like my eyes are shy. Then a belly, a soft belly that I love.
That’s how she came into view, and still I don’t know that I see everything. I’m trying to do it with my ears, trying to remember each word.
Her lips fire off old neural networks in microseconds, me awkward, remembering, wanting to shake off this old skin, see and hear and breathe. just breath again.
I try not to think about love, try not to let it break me. Yes, I can say it. I will, and I do. But it’s me that does that. And me, and I, can be a scared moodiness. No, I want to do it with my life. Not wrapped around anyone, no, but drawn out and easy, with plenty of room for attention, dreams and desire. I want to see everything, piece by piece, maybe a whole life someday, but for now the parts of her coming together are plucking at my heart strings slowly, the dust falling.

You would’ve laughed to see me rise up this morning.
The dust, old with want, falling from my eyes.