"These Pieces of Me Shine Brighter In Your Hands" (A Raggedy Love Letter From Me to You

It started when the butterflies in my stomach fled to take up lodging somewhere safer, because something much stronger has come to occupy my insides and tie my veins in knots until my pulse sings and my heart has started working overtime to compensate. The hollowness in my bones keeps ringing and if you were to put your ear to my chest the caverns inside each single rib would echo a thousand times over again sounding distinctly like the way your voice did the first time you said my name. 

This all began with a whisper like an indescribable restlessness and I must have lathered and rinsed more than ten times in the shower that morning trying to untangle it from my hair and dig it from my pores only to realize it's been seeping over me from the inside out. I scrubbed my hands so hard the skin cracked and after examining the blotches drying on my hand towel I realized none of what I am trying to purge myself of is leaving my bloodstream.

It’s something about the way your teeth are piano keys and your tongue is a paint brush and I want our mouths to make modern art together, so messy and out of reach most call it a fool’s game. The way you enter a room is seamless but earthshaking, you are the conductor starting a symphony pounding away in my chest and my fingers tremble and fidget with clothing, paper, anything I can twist into a temporary anchor as I try to remember how not to feel swept away by music no one else hears. 

When I was six years old visiting the seashore I stood knee deep in the waves just off the coast of Maine and the current swallowed my toes until they sunk beneath the fine grains of weathered sand, my father told me not to be scared and I laughed. I remember feeling like a tree taking root, there in the middle of all that is rough and wild, and fear was no more than a memory staining my grubby hands. It feels the same now because I want to close my eyes and float endlessly on the currents of your laughter and days after our conversations I find grains of sand between my toes and gritty in my throat when I swallow. 

I can’t tell you precisely when but one morning I woke up and you were there, the first thought to brighten my drowsy eyes and pull the corners of my lips into a smile, and every time I see you I smell the sweet mist before rain and think of bubblegum pink and Saturday afternoon trips to the candy store and running barefoot after a storm that has just cleared and moisture turns the sidewalk into silk beneath my calloused feet. My watch broke and I haven’t fixed it. I don’t want to see the time passing between our hello’s and goodbyes. Even on days when I want to burn the remnants of every poem I have ever written and stop existing in this plane of consciousness you dredge up the human parts of me from the ache and the crook of your shoulder shields me from the hailstorm of my own mind. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is as close as I can come to telling you I love you and I would but the words burn my throat and my pens keep running out of ink and all the things I really want to tell you are still bottled up inside. These are the spilled over truths. The candy wrappers with scribbled fragments of poems I forget scattered on your desk, sweet reminders that you have turned my vocal cords into stringed instruments that are never in tune but always sing vibrant color into the night sky. The clouds of dust trailing from a supernova drifting through space. The fingerprints my clumsy hands leave on everything. These are the scraps of myself I try to write into songs. The splintered off corners of dreams. Raggedy love letters from me to you.