Dear You...

I feel like I’ve written this a hundred times…and that I’ll be writing it a hundred more.  Of course, it hasn’t been nearly that many, but…it might be some day. 

Through all of the writes and rewrites, what remains consistent is the fact that I am utterly taken by you.  No matter how hard I try not to be, I can’t seem to help it or get over it.  No matter how much I reason with myself, nothing I say makes enough sense.

I see you here and there; I know a little of you—enough to make me want to know more—and I can’t help but wonder what it might be like to hold your hand…to sit down somewhere and talk, just you and I…to look you in the eye through it all.

I know…you have yours and I have mine…I might stray; I would never ask you to.  Were I someone else, someone a little bolder, a little more confident, a little more reckless, I don’t know that I wouldn’t.  But I’m not, so I guess that means you’re in the clear.  Right?

God, I don’ t know what it is about you!  What is it that makes it so damn hard to get you out of my head.  I read books, I watch TV and movies, I fill my days with work and distractions and still, the minute that I am unencumbered, the minute my head is free, you slide back in like water through the slightest opening in my wall, filling my head with images of someday being allowed to kiss you.  Moving pictures of our lips meeting and the intoxication that always accompanies those first kisses.  Inevitably, the kiss will play itself out in my head, sometimes a gentle brush of our lips leading to a measured, rhythmic ebb and flow of kissing, sometimes a frantic, near manic crush of mouth on mouth.  Whatever the beginning, whatever the act, the dream always leaves me feeling as though I’d been physically struck.

Sometimes, you come to me at night…inhabiting my dreams, convincing me that you are real, that you are really looking me in the eye, touching my skin, kissing my lips.  Sometimes, for long minutes I believe that you are there, that we are together, that all of the images that fill my head are finally becoming something more than lingering thoughts and desperate wishes…….

But then, invariably, I awaken to find you are not there, that all I have is the memory of what it felt like for our lips to meet……..