Oh, how lucky I am
Oh, how lucky I am.
In truth, that is the strange part.
I loved someone so completely
that my whole body rearranged itself around them.
A tree that grew around a fence,
around a wound, around whatever was simply there long enough.
There until they weren't.
But the shape of them stayed.
Mama didn't tell me that part about loving deeply.
Now I know it doesn't leave with the person.
It just changes its address.
Moves somewhere quieter. Slips off its shoes and stays.
I still love you.
Not the you of now, the you I cannot see,
the you that time has been quietly building in a room I no longer have the key to.
I love the you I knew.
Who laughed with me at odd hours of the night
when you were so tired but I couldn't sleep.
The you I memorized before I knew I was memorizing.
So here's the tragic irony.
I love you now
and I loved you then.
But I knew you then.
And I do not know you now.
Even then, the love stays whole.
But the remembrance turns soft in my hands.
Sometimes I try to picture your face
and it comes back clear,
and sometimes it unravels in my mind
like picture rubbed over thin to many times.
And I panic, quietly,
feeling nothing but everything.
And I mean everything down past the surface,
into pit where uncertainty and forgiveness live side by side.
It's the blessing and curse of having been made like this
to feel in waterfalls and rivers,
rather than ponds and lilies.
A current rather than still water.
To long for not who they were, but how you knew them.
Loving someone into a life you won't live beside.
Oh, how lucky I am.
I have to keep saying it.
Not to be move on. Not to be okay.
But because no matter how strange, it's true.
I loved enough,
and I was cared for too.
The missing will outlast everything.
It will be there when I am old.
When I have forgotten the exact sound of your laugh
I will still feel the softness of who you were.
That is not nothing. That is, somehow, everything.
Because, for a while,
I got to love someone that kind.
Oh, how lucky I am.
- Nevie Jay