To The Love I Do Not Yet Have
By Josh Kinney
You are still my noble pursuit, and the reason why I haven’t settled.
Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other. Although we’re apart, this life I am building is for us. Everything I do is with you in mind, and our future family.
When I can’t sleep at night I still stare at the empty side of my bed and wonder about the things I’d tell you if you were laying next to me, if you and I shared this apartment. It wouldn’t just be my arrangements but it would include your style and touch throughout. I like to imagine it.
Whenever I see a sunrise or sunset over the beach or do something or go somewhere epic, I can’t help but still be thinking of you. That’s how you know you really love someone, when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person was there to see or be a part of it with you, even if you haven’t met them.
I can’t wait to photograph you and come up with fitting poetic captions to express my adoration. I can’t tell you how many times I have fantasized about us driving down the coast to Savannah in the springtime. It’s sunny, you’re laughing and smiling in the passenger seat and we’re singing the Relient K song, “Savannah” together. I see our handprints on the car windows, steamed up from the inside. And you know, I have had plenty of opportunities to visit this Georgian city and always wanted to, but I’d like to wait until we’re together. I’ve avoided it because I want it to be a pilgrimage fulfilled, and so I can then sing the song and really mean it when I look over to you and let my soul say to yours, “At last, there you are. I’ve spent my life wondering, wondering when I’d find you.”
I still want to sit and watch the city lights with you from the top of the Art Museum steps in Philadelphia and listen to the ocean waves at night in Ocean City and take you out to countless dinners and find someone to take a old-school Polaroid pictures of us kissing in every new city we adventure.
Know that I still want this. I want these letters filled with ink to finally be delivered to their rightful owner.
I want us.
You know, anymore I find it hard to even be intimate with anyone except you. It almost seems pointless, in all honesty.
You don’t know this yet, but I have embarrassed myself on behalf of you countless times, yet I could really care less, because you are still worth it to me.
You are still the only one who makes my entire sense leap. Still, to this day, I choose you.
You radiate wisdom, maturity, confidence and creativity, yet you’re out there, somewhere, on a journey of your own. How many things have yet to happen before our paths intersect? Or have they already done so? All of these subtle intricacies from running late to a meeting, missing a subway train, responding to that one post or comment, could at any moment lead us to the moment when we’re sitting across each other in the flesh, our whole lives ahead of us.
In your physical absence, these public and private letters, this very language has become another way to have you. Every word is like a wandering hand, peeling away your dress, pulling at your hair, stroking your back. Each sentence and paragraph builds and reaches slowly. Every pause and comma: a gasp.
But this is just yet another scene from the true and impossible story of my very great love to be.
Always, eternally “to be.”
That’s where you continuously remain after all these years.
Still.