You once wrote to me, “the world sleeps until you wake up,” as we lived our separate, parallel, lives, but we were somehow already joined by that gossamer thread that unites every couple. I’m a romantic, yes, but I know that what I feel about you is more than just some whizzing endorphins doing their thing when I feel your touch on my skin last thing at night and your eyes on me first thing in the morning even when we’re 10,000km apart. You’re a part of my consciousness, someone I think of involuntarily now throughout my day. Wondering about how you are is like taking a breath.
And then,
the clock chimes 7, or 8pm, and it’s my turn to be without you. You’re usually
going to sleep first, unless I’m awake into the wee hours of the next morning.
So in my evenings I get to luxuriate in you. I get to wonder about you, and I’m
well aware that in these spaces between seeing one another, touching one
another and talking, we could be inventing false narratives, but then I look
back at the words we’ve written to one another, and I think about the feeling I
get when I listen to your voice, how my feet feel more solid on the earth, how
I feel like I’m more inside my body and how my shoulders drop into their
correct posture.
I feel warm
when I think about you. And I’m usually a person with cold hands and feet, who
needs an extra layer with her just in case.
***
As I read this back I know I have been GIDDY and drunk on
you all summer, and I realise that I still am, but that it’s maturing into
something deeper than “oh look how compatible the internet says we are”. I
think of all of the combined hours we have now spent talking on the phone, each
wrapped up in the thoughts of the other, and I find myself wondering if this
time spent living thousands upon thousands of kilometres apart will be the
thing that we look back on as the making and cementing of our bond. I wonder if
it’s a blessing, because most other couples living in the same place might get
lots more physical time together, but I wonder if they know one another's brains in the
same way as we do after four months.
I suppose it’s not the comparison, anyway, that is
important. What is important is that the world still sleeps until you wake,
that as I write this I’m fully conscious of how much I desire you, and that
although sometimes frustrating to not be able to reach out and touch your arm,
lace my fingers with yours, look into your eyes, or stroke your head, noticing
how much those moments are missed is as crucial to understanding what this – us
– we – means to me. I’m very much enjoying letting that flow over me, and
through me, today as I write at my kitchen table, waiting for you to wake up in
the tomorrow that you’re already in.
