Last Night

Last night, for the first time, I saw your smile and knew that I would give everything just to have you direct it my way. Last night, six months later, I opened my door to find it standing there, worn on the face of my future. You said little and beamed at me as I said too much –a theme that would carry on throughout the relationship that would follow. Last night, it took you forever to kiss me, and it was entirely worth the wait.

Last night, three months into the story of us, I knew I loved you. We sat watching the sunset, and as ice cream dripped down your hand in the summer heat, I fought with myself trying to determine which was more beautiful – the sky or your impossibly blue eyes. The song on the radio or the beauty mark on the bridge of your nose. The improbability that we would ever end up here or the look you give me when you catch me staring – which, I admit, is often. Last night we danced to Jordan Davis and Julia Michaels in our tiny living room amassed with plants and tripping hazards. Though clumsily and not without laughter, you spun me into the realization that I had finally fallen into the fairytale I’d spent my entire life in search of. Last night I told you I loved you and you cried because you couldn’t say it back. You told me that you weren’t sure you knew what love was. It broke my heart, not because I wouldn’t hear it leave your lips, but because instead I heard that you didn’t even know the meaning of your own name. I made a promise to myself I would show you love every single day so you would never second guess it when it wrapped itself around you next.

Because last night and every night you prove to me that you are love. Last night you mentioned missing home so I unplugged all the electronics and pulled all the sofa cushions to the floor so we could lay in front of the open patio door while it stormed. Taking you back from whence you came. You heard home in the rain and I heard home in your heartbeat. And then last night you told me you’d have to go.

Even though I had steeled myself for it’s inevitability, part of me hoped you wouldn’t. Every decision I ever made lead me to you and I didn’t know life would be so cruel as to take you as quickly as I found you.

Last night I sat across from you as we discussed the prospect of tomorrow – both of us carefully omitting each other from it. Like two people sharing a meal to get to know one another, we did the same in reverse. We both said little and held hands over the table while the world spun madly on around us. Wine sitting thick in my throat like the tears I desperately wanted to cry for the pending death of us. Last night I woke up and you weren’t there, and every part of me screamed because I thought you were already gone. When you came to bed fifteen minutes later you found me breaking. You held me like you would never let me go and I came apart in your arms.

Come undone by the idea of waking up without you by my side. Last night we packed your bags. I paced from room to room in a house that for once felt too small, trying to figure out how I could shrink myself to hide inside your clothes, beneath the pieces of your life here that you decided to take with you.

Last night, you held me as I clung to you as if you were the breath I couldn’t catch. A lifeboat I desperately needed. You kissed my forehead and rocked me in the backseat while you whispered that everything would be ok.

Last night, for the first time, I didn’t believe you. This morning I realized that nobody ever prepares you for the heartbreak with good intentions. That loving you would be the perfect day, and waking up and sinking into the deafening quiet of our home instead of you would be the most horrific hangover.

This morning, after, I still didn’t want to open the blinds to see a sun that dared shine where you weren’t. The one that had the nerve to illuminate the parts of me your hands would no longer touch. This morning, months later, I sat to write about us and I collapsed under the pressure to find language beautiful enough to describe the way we were. The thing we could have been had circumstance not upended our story. No matter how I decorate the pages of us, its flora and fauna wont bring a deserved ending.

And instead I’m pierced by the fact that tomorrow someone else will fall in love with your smile, and your impossibly blue eyes. Tomorrow someone else might hear home in your chest and the future in your accent. Spun by the steadiest hands I’ve ever known in her tiny living room.

Tomorrow, someone else will become the luckiest woman in the world.

And tomorrow while I try to eradicate your sayings from my speech and remember to brew one cup of coffee instead of two, she will be learning the delicate choreography of avoiding clashing elbows in her tiny shower. The sounds you make when you're dreaming. What song you listen to when you’re sad.

While I dance with the ghost of us she will be planning the future of you.

But today I get to rest with the reality that even on the quietest mornings I can seek solace in knowing that loving you made me the best version of me.

That I will never be the same, forever changed by a beautiful boy, our improbable fairy tale, and last night.