* * *
On the night before your wedding I asked you, “what is the geography of love?”
It’s a land I’m afraid of becauseI’ve heard they’re all nudists because you have to strip yourself bare to be vulnerable. I prefer layers. I’ve been folding myself into sharp creases telling myself I’ll shape a paper crane someday.
You asked: Do you remember what our love tasted like?
I remembered the rain beading a necklace on the nape of your neck and the cold stone on my spine in the graveyard the day I was too afraid to tell you. But I said no.
I’ve wrapped words around my windpipe till the sound is clogged and sometimes it the things you want most you have to let silence enfold.
Love doesn’t possess things because it is the child of a treasure hunter and a miner. It unlocks the birdcages, it winds up courage like a jack-in-the-box and whites out the periods at the ends of sentences so the stories keep going.
Love is a song we played on a saw, between the teeth, and the whine of our ghosts always haunted the melody, but we cut each other into before and after. And you can’t ask for love back. Love shatters our bodies but we keep collecting the pieces to make kaleidoscopes. And that damage is beauty, waiting to turn.
I said, tell me your love story.
You said I have so many.
You sent me a letter that was just a blank page, and it said everything. I carry it in my wallet; I let it change owners, because love only makes us wider, it’s like splitting the darkness open like a loaf and swallowing that density.
You said love is a land full of beggars, who will tap you on the shoulder and hold their hands empty waiting for your offer. Love will ask you for all your glances cast backward, for your nervous laughter, for the times you run up your basement stairs. It will ask for all your fears. And it will scare the hell out of you. So what will you carry in your pockets?
I said what is the weather like there? And you said, it isn’t mild. The climate is tropic. There are typhoons, like the time we made love after his hands shook holding the letter that said he was HIV+ and we wept, entwined in each other.
And the typhoons make swamps like the time it was halfway to morning and our shoes were drowning in the rainwater and you said “God’s not crying, he’s wishing he could annihilate us again.” And I said, I didn’t think so, it’s more like She knew the only thing that would make sense was howling.
There are cliffs, where a school of jellyfish swims in your stomach when you dangle your feet over the side. And you know there is nothing --nothing between you and that freefall. But you jump. And the water will crack your ribs and restart your heart every time.
I heard you were happy. And I was happy to know it.
I never understood physics but this is how I learned the world is round, because there are no corners where someone can stand with their back against a wall.
Because you turned my ear into a seashell when it was pressed to your navel and now it remembers the ocean inside you and recalls it to me across all this distance. I knew I was beautiful after you loved me, even when we cast ourselves back on the tide, because the hollows are deeper-- and I can only love more.
I’d spent so much time being afraid that love was a limited resource. That if I gave it away, if you took it away, I would be here with my hands open, empty. But, love keeps on growing like those volcanic eruptions under the ocean building new islands.
Love is like Strega Nona’s pasta pot, there will be too much, you will be full.
Love will be leftover.
Yes.
Love will be left over.
