for the man i haven't met

I forget what I looked like before you.
I’m pretty sure its nothing like now, because how could my face have held this much joy? How could my chest have carried this much love? My eyes would have been dim, my body thick with lethargy. I could have drowned in this love if it weren’t for the wings you made for me.

When I see you, I recognize your face as my own. Its when I look in the mirror that I get confused Your skin is my skin and my heart beats in your chest and all the loneliness you‘ve ever felt is within me, hidden in my blood and under my tongue.

You are the one person unafraid of my love. You rally under my love like banners of war, you taste the sweat of my love when you drink from the earth, you devour my love like the eagle and Prometheus and I have never felt so whole.

The flesh of your back was under my fingernails long before I ever knew you. You came walking out of the shadows of destiny and ordered a coffee, black, while your calloused hands reached for God in the back of a newspaper and found his personal ad seeking you, and when you dialed the number you dialed mine by mistake. In your voice was a six string guitar and something like rainstorms and now I lay open to you like your favorite blank pages. Your tongue strips ribbons of flesh from my thighs and our hearts pump each others blood in time with the tides and the stars fall into your hair like snowflakes from heaven when we visit my family for Christmas.

And for my part… It’s like finding the lost part of myself, and falling in love with it. I forget that I never knew you. I forget that thieves of my love swept away the dust of my heart into hallways and under rugs. I forget that it once took me fifty years to summon the courage to breathe again, to wake up again, to stand on my own to feet and sing halleluiah. Before I knew you, I must have been sick with this overflowing love, too full to hold it back in tears and sweat and vomit. I must have dulled the edges of my pain with anything I could find: a stray cat, alcohol, a toxic relationship. I must have failed in my faith in order to preserve my moment. I must have lost hope in finding you.

But your love is what created me. You reached into my dark pool of unrequited love and lifted out my pure and golden heart into the light. You made me wings so I could fly and survive the flood of love pouring over me. You saw the eternity my love was going to take from you, and embraced me.

If I have ever felt this way before, it was when I was in heaven. I swam in a river under majestic mountains and a cloudless red sky, and I knew love was only second to god. In those long moments my heart was as full as it was empty, was beating as fast as it was still. Forever felt like it had happened yesterday. And now, in reality, in the human flesh of experience, I look into your eyes and see rivers of forever, mountains and skies of love. My heart is as full as it is empty, an endless giving and taking between us. My heart beats as fast as it is still, finding infinity in measured time. You are mine.