You Were Happiness When I Expected Nothing

By

The truth is, I wasn’t quite as whole as I meant to be when we first met.

You were laughter and reprieve on a warm August evening, a time when my heart was still restringing itself from repeated betrayal. I was looking for release at the bottom of tequila shots that you chased right along with me, with eyes and a smile drawing circles around my waist.

Without fully understanding why, you were an accident I wasn’t ready for, as fingertips trace constellations in the throes of something so intimate.

We were mourning our own losses but I was so thankful for this. For you, for stirring broken words in oceans I had long given up on.

Months went by without a sound, and you remained in words I couldn’t find the courage to mouth. Too little, too late, in the silence that remained – I watched my body dance in-between the faceless chatter until I found you again in the hard month of March.

You were warm coffee for a girl whose days came in waves and a heart with depths that oceanographers had yet to discover.

You were a strawberry daiquiri on a night I was fighting ghosts of loved ones lost, with a kiss to put the earth’s axis on hold.

You were happiness when I expected nothing.

You are everything and nothing that I would have imagined someone to be. You are lines of numbers when I am but letters strung together that don’t quite make much sense, and yet I want to formulate a sentence in this language you’ve grown so accustomed to.

I’m losing sighs like loose change in the soft touch of your fingertips against the slope of my back, and I wonder why I waited this long to tell you that I have been harboring questions in this rib cage of mine, too scared to take a tumble out of fragile lips once broken by sad, clumsy young men.

But this soft amber skin blushes only for you now, and though I am waiting for you to grow weary of this smile of mine—know it’s held steadfast for a man whose eyes pour over me like running honey.