I would dare you to find an icon of love that you hadn't thought of, would ask of you to search through old shoeboxes of letters and stray strands of scents that remind you of the ocean, of comfort, of a drive through a snowy evening, of the sweetness of crawling into bed and having a waist to curl an arm around. For me, I cannot replicate that sensation, no matter how many times I've done it, no matter whom with; to duplicate that emotion would be like trying to copy air. It's always different but anchored in the same shifting seas that curl around me like a letter 'S' and ebb and flow with a pulse that I cannot trace the origin to.

Couldn't you be a part of this? Wouldn't it be so easy to shed shortcomings and trust and just swim? Just sink. Fathom it.

It's never easy, though.

So we discussed passion and how it is to be full-on with everything, to be blessed with the capacity to, in theory, love more powerfully and taste so many highs and lows. During the lows, it's easy to wish that you could negotiate emotion and rest on a thin line of stability. During the highs, though, you could forget everything except how someone tastes. The road back home is flecked with their smell, the way their lips turn up, just a little, before a kiss. The sky is a pattern woven of themselves, the ground the very swells that you know from their body. Euphoria - it's when you don't need a map. Once you have this person in your mind and they're able to come to you in dreams as well as reality, tell me that isn't a level of holiness, of divinity. If I prayed I would pray for you. I could kneel, hands folded, in any cathedral, under dizzying stained-glass faces.

Pray for, but not to. Appriciate, but do not drown. What's love without sacrifice? Vice versa?

Between all of these lines, it is a challange and a dare and I would wonder if I could ever stop my heart from speeding like a comet towards a situation that doesn't seem timely but so inviting still: a kiss?

A transaction exchanged a billion times over in this world but each one so encompassing that I could fold inside it like reverse origami until I was a single point, nestled in red or blue or whatever hue you would think love to be. Sometimes it's just a blur when the colors match, but when they don't, it's art. Grey is a shade. Black is a color. I wonder what we look like lying side by side. A ying/yang? Two horizontal lines? Do we bleed into one another with cautious rivulets?

How can this be so fierce?

no answers at all,

Jared