i'd learn to be gentle for you

let me be gentle with you,

i don’t mean for a moment,
or only on the days
you make loving look effortless,
i mean on the mornings when
you’ve barely slept, when the world
has already asked too much
of you before you’ve even left
the bed, when your first instinct
is still to apologize for things
that were never yours to carry,
come here anyway, lay your forehead
against mine, let me love you
before you’ve had the chance to
become brave again, because i think
you’ve spent far too much of
your life believing you had to
survive before you were allowed
to be held.

i think i would spend years
learning your language, not so
i could impress you by saying
every word perfectly, but because
i cannot bear the thought of
there being a part of you
that still lives somewhere i cannot
reach, i want to know the
words your mother says when she
worries about you, the ones your
grandmother whispered while brushing your hair
away from your face while you
were studying, the little names that
have followed you since you were
too small to remember them, because
i have this feeling every person
carries a version of themselves that
only exists in the language they
first learned to call home, and
i want to spend the rest
of my life meeting her too.

i already know how this will
go, you’ll say the same word
three times, i’ll ruin it four,
you’ll laugh, shake your head, step
closer until there’s barely any room
left between us, your hands will
find my face because that’s what
they always do whenever you’re trying
to teach me something, your thumbs
resting against my cheeks while you
ask me to watch your mouth,
and i won’t know whether i’m
looking at your lips because i’m
trying to learn the word, or
because i’m hopelessly in love with
the woman speaking it, i think
i’d happily spend a lifetime getting
it wrong if every mistake meant
you’d keep looking at me with
that kind of patience.

you hold my face like i’m
something precious, and i don’t know
if anyone has ever told you
what that feels like from where
i’m standing, there is something about
the way your palms settle against
my skin that makes every frightened
part of me stop looking for
the nearest exit, i have never
known a love so impossibly gentle,
never known another human being who
could look at me without trying
to measure what i could give
them in return, you look at
me as though i am already
enough, and every time you do,
another lonely version of me finally
gets to come home.

sometimes i catch you looking at
me with those eyes, the ones
that are forever asking questions your
mouth is too afraid to speak,
and all i want to do
is kiss every worry from your
forehead until you forget what it
ever felt like to carry them,
i want to hold your face
the way you hold mine, as
though i have been entrusted with
something holy, as though there is
nothing in this world i should
be more careful with than the
heart beating inside your chest, because
there isn’t.

i want to know every ordinary
thing about you, the side of
the bed you drift towards without
noticing, whether you steal the blanket
in your sleep, whether you reach
for me before you’ve fully woken,
whether your tea grows cold because
you keep forgetting to drink it
while you’re reading, whether you hum
the same line of a song
without realizing, whether you still tuck
your hands inside your sleeves when
you’re cold, because i don’t want
to love you only in the
extraordinary moments, i want to know
the thousand tiny ways your soul
moves through an ordinary day.

and if one evening i find
you standing by the kitchen window,
the sky already dark, your shoulders
carrying more than they should, i
won’t ask you to explain yourself
before you’re ready, i’ll walk over,
stand close enough that our arms
touch, rest my hand over yours
on the counter, and we’ll stay
like that for as long as
the silence asks us to, because
i have learned that love isn’t
always another conversation, sometimes it’s simply
refusing to leave, sometimes it’s telling
the person beside you, without saying
a single word, that they no
longer have to carry the evening
alone.

i don’t want to rescue you,
i don’t think you need rescuing,
i think you’ve been saving yourself
for so long that you’ve forgotten
what it feels like to let
another pair of hands help, so
let me earn that privilege one
ordinary day at a time, let
me remember the things you only
mention once, let me notice the
tiredness in your eyes before you
tell me you’re exhausted, let me
become the place your heart reaches
for before it reaches for fear.

and if years from now someone
asks me what the greatest thing
i ever learned was, i don’t
think i’ll tell them about books,
or cities, or all the clever
things i once thought mattered, i’ll
tell them i learned the language
of one remarkable woman, i learned
that love sometimes sounds like laughter
echoing through a kitchen, sometimes it
sounds like your name spoken correctly
for the very first time, and
sometimes it says nothing at all,
it only cups a trembling face
between two careful hands and promises,
i am here, you never have
to be afraid of being held
again.

From my Blue Journal:

Love is not tenderness to me, it is appetite, it is the marrow-deep hunger of something that has been starving so long it has forgotten the taste of its own fullness, and you are the first meal I have ever wanted to survive on, come here, I am asking you with whatever animal is left inside my ribs, take me into the cage of your arms and do not let the door swing open again, because I have spent years perfecting the art of wanting nothing, of numbing my own pulse until it barely registered as mine, and now there is you, and my blood has become a language I cannot translate fast enough, every nerve a live wire, every inch of skin a confession I did not mean to make, I long for you the way the body longs for oxygen after the lungs have been held under too long, a longing that is not delicate, that does not ask permission, that claws its way up through the sternum and out the throat, and I would peel back every callus I have built to protect myself from being loved badly and hand you the raw thing underneath, the thing that still bleeds when it is touched, because you are the only hand I have ever trusted with a wound this old, I think of the hundred lives I might have lived, the hundred versions of this world where we never met, and still, in every one of them, I would claw my way toward you, through rot and ruin and every neglect the universe could invent, I would find you standing there and choose you again, not out of certainty but out of some older, more animal knowing, the kind that lives below language, below reason, below the part of the brain that keeps tidy records, so take all of me, the parts I can explain and the parts that dissolve the moment I try to name them, take the marrow, take the ache, take the whole unbearable architecture of a heart that has finally stopped protecting itself, because I would rather be undone by wanting you than intact and untouched for the rest of my life, and I would choose this, I would choose you, in every century, in every skin, in every ruined and remade version of me that has ever existed or ever will.