You Loved Me Before I Was Ready

You wanted me way before I was ready. You wanted me when wanting was something foreign to me, reactive in the most terrifying ways. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming.

You pursued me before I could even connect your face to your name. Again, as always, before I was ready. Yet now, how can I acknowledge your desires as greedy, when I would do anything for you to feel the same way again. But I wasn’t ready.

You wanted me when I did nothing but exist as myself before you. Before I had learned the depth of oceans in your brown eyes before your laugh was enough to ignite an all-encompassing tingle within me that calls for your hands wrapped around me. You saw me in my purest form before I tried to be alluring for your male gaze. And as always, before I was ready.

My thoughts of you are not constant, and I don’t even mean that in a bragging way. Because what does it say when I am pressed between bodies within the crowd, double whiskey in hand, music vibrating my bones, friends mirroring the smile on my face, and then, you. What I would do to turn to you, see your smile and hope that I am even reason for the smallest fraction of it, that I can reach down and feel your fingers dancing to be intertwined with mine. Like a mirage of my unconscious, I imagine you beside me, that we can both experience this moment, individually, and as one.

See, because while I whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly, whole-bodily lust for you, I also aspire to merely exist in this second and proximity of space with you. I would prefer to sip French pressed coffee and read books across the couch from you rather than alone. Because finally, I have found you exist. Every shooting star, turn of the clock, birthday candles, and late-night whispers have delivered your existence to overlap with mine.

Because now, I am ready. Now that we have talked about history and literature over beer roulette and the way you love your parents but keep yourself at arms lengthen. Now that I know you always run five minutes late so that you can shower, now that we’ve eaten raspberries like knocking down walls of insecurities and protection. Now that you’ve displayed your inability to let anyone go and we spend more time laughing than anything else. See, now that we have talked about far off dreams and I have been completely broken, and open with you. Now I am ready. I have spilled all my secrets like water dripping from a faucet, you have done this to me. Now I am ready.

Now, where are you?

I replay so many moments stained with your memory, I know you can’t have forgotten. But how do you make someone love you when you turned them down so swiftly.

It’s an unfortunate talent in my repertoire. I have learned the game and crafted the responses to others wanting to run their fingers down my spine, crack me like a new book, skip to the parts they fancy, and leave when they are through. How can they not? In a society that tells us to always put up a front, I am enigmatic, exceptional, new. I’d like to think I was made for you.

And maybe this isn’t my fault at all. How could you treat me and play all the same games as you do with every other woman you aesthetically admire? Why didn’t you wait, be patient? Instead, you tried to consume all of me, an intrusive feeling that you were merely around to devour me. And I wasn’t ready. Your immediacy, your eagerness, your demanding nature was suffocating.

And here we are, full circle, as I wait for your desire to swing back to me, suffocating.