I Knew Then
I knew then, during that journey; you, beside me on the back seat of the car. Your favourite summer songs were playing, and our moods were enthusiastic as we drew ever closer to engaging with the wilderness.
I knew then, emphatically, and, at times overwhelmed, felt compelled to gaze, away from you, through the side window of the car at the primal, pined and mountainous landscape turning about us as we moved along the sparsely trafficked road. Sporadically, amidst our conversation and laughter, I felt gentle swells in my body, spasms of affection; my essence yearning to reach out to you, but restrained, like an enthusiastic puppy tied to a rope. In those moments I would focus downwards, towards the earth, the emotional agitations that whirled within, like drunken butterflies, exhilarated on excesses of nectar.
Periodically, our bodies, softly and rhythmically, leaned into each other as the vehicle veered around broad bends in the road. Sometimes your hand would grasp my thigh, to steady yourself when you lost balance with the listing of the car as it suddenly lunged into a tight corner. Inside, each random touch warmed me with a contented thrill.
I knew then, as I meditated on being in your presence. My every expression served as a diversion from initiating the contact I so longingly desired to yield; by touch, word or look. The emotion of knowing, coupled with a mind of restraint, encoded in the subtle actions of cloaked suggestion.
I knew it had begun. I knew it would grow. I knew I desired it to flourish and thrive in fulfilment. I knew it would grow, because I would allow it, because it was love and I would not oppose love, however it manifested.
Perhaps then I believed that a reciprocal love would not transpire. Yet still I imagined, and within, shaped the spectacles of endless instances of superlative loving, performed between the illusion and myself.
As we drove along you didn’t see the brief shining tears, reflected in the glass of the window beside me. Nor did you feel the ardent yearning of spirit, that aspires yet, with equal purpose and intensity, in these future years we draw towards us.
What I did not know then, I know now; that love will go on, regardless of pragmatics. Regardless of the stories we impinge on our defenceless lives, the contrived social narratives designed to preserve us from encountering the uncomfortable reflections of our behaviour, inevitably revealed in the presence of our unresolved and dislocated relationships.
And yes, here I am again, in my own world.
I wonder what you know; what would move you to deliver your words; impassioned gushes of wild colour, incisive with truth and spontaneity. Will you not splash them, confidently, about your body, that I might behold the reflections of my expressions, in the aspects of the muscles of your soul? Or will you forever conceal the hidden tones of your liberty, and in my presence default to a cultivated and modest mystique.
That which makes us feel uncomfortable is, necessarily, the engagement with the awkward turning of the ill-fitting key, in the resistant lock of the imposing door to the fearsome and fabulous unknown, behind which all the familiar mysteries lie; hazy forms of dreams that already know our names, and like ancient friends, call us to dance our forgotten dances.
Perhaps my energy is overly sentimental, and the prospect of love would fare more auspiciously with the emotional accruement of the past cut away and dumped.
Yet boldly and irrevocably I cast my lot into the core of love. No matter whether your fire warms or burns me.
