Tuesday, May 1, 2012

too much

"No,"

"Write a blog."

"No." I said, standing in the sagging seat of my old red reading chair, my arms around his shoulders, my eyes a half inch above his. "I'm bigger than you, for once, and I said no." I leaned in and knocked my forehead against his.

"Not much bigger." and he smiled that whole wheat smile and turned his greenhouse gaze on me. I felt myself blossom a little as he tilted his chin up to kiss me, raised his heels just slightly off the ground, and was once again the big to my little. "Just write something, please"

"Nothing doing." He kissed me again. And again. If our mouths in these last few weeks have been scrawling out the story of what we will be, our kisses have been the spaces between words. Sighs as verbs. Shoulder nibbles forming hour long inquiries into what it means to love. Me, chewing my lips as he talks, as he teaches without ever trying, saying with my bad habits: I hear you. I know you. And in the spaces between each silent conjugation of "to learn you," "to see you," a kiss to breathe. To pause it all.

I watched him turn to walk down the stairs, looping the half wall between my living room and I watched his sway, his comfort in his own body. I jumped from the seat of my reading chair, put one foot on the arm of it, cleared the gap between the half wall and the chair, and stood, leaning imperiously over him. My head touched the ceiling, and he was a half story below me. I needed five more seconds of the direct sunlight of his smile. I needed to feel myself expanding under it's light. So I stretched out over the stairs, to the teeter totter tipping point of my girlchild balance, told him it simply wasn't going to happen, and kissed him again.

These have been my mornings. These, and the longest cups of coffee known to man, pulling length from the rubber band moments that threaten to snap back and pull me headlong and stinging into the runaway glory of fuller days.

I have sat dreamily in front of this blog-love of mine. In front of this first illicit kiss of overshare tiny celebrity, and wondered what I would tell you. What is too much?

There is the line, always the line, between saying too much and saying too little. There is the foggy breath-now vapor-now finger drawn mirror note's difference between giving too much to the invisible interweb-world and not being able to give at all.

There are so many things I'd love to say, about the things growing inside of me. About the things I suddenly find germinating from seeds I already possessed under the watchful eyes of hope, of happening.

But there is not a breath of my truth which has not traveled through every part of me, which has not taken refuge from cynical eyes in my most intimate places. So I said "No, nothing doing." when all I meant was "Yes, let's tell it all, and tell it bold, and tell it loud."

Sometimes I'll be sitting perfectly still, or reading, or talking nine miles per second and I'll feel my heartbeat in my fingers, in the backs of my knees, in the tender places behind my ears, and that vigilant always waking place behind my eyes. I can feel my pulse the very mitochondria of my cells and I'm almost certain that I am nothing but one big beating heart. I feel with utter certainty that these limbs are arteries and that I am a mass of ventricles and this squeezing, sloshing, fluttering sinew of a human being will at any moment be shocked into life or death by the merest electric hope.

So how do I bare just enough, when any bit of me is all of me? How do I only say his name, and not blush. How do I only tell the philosophy without the truth? How do I tell of the fullness, without detailing the very chemical compostion of all those things which have brought me near to bursting.

I think I won't. I think, before the curtain falls, I'll have said it all.


3 comments:

Maria said...

That's about the bravest piece you've ever written ... Or at least shared. I am so proud of you. He must be pretty amazing.
Love you to the moon.

Unknown said...

So very sweet, these words, and so very good. You are a lovely, walking-heart of a human being.

zborman said...

"For it would seem — her case proved it — that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."

Just came across this passage in Orlando and it made me think of you and this blog entry...