Seabirds

When I want to remember love, intimate connection, there’s a reinvention occurring in the depths of my mind.

Some call it—imagination.

We are created by one.

An imagination. A mind that births ideas, practices critical thought, discerns truth from lie.

I birthed it from the womb of my inner parts, not my psyche. From a place that aches and itches.

I am sitting on a beach, or maybe in a park, having a conversation with you.

Nothing remarkable—which is what makes it honest, undefiled. I don’t know you. I imagine if I did, what it would be like—to know you.

But—there is an electric current between us, outside of my head. It’s in yours.

Oh the permission in your eyes. I know it all too well, but you restrain it.

And that will remain a mystery to me—of what might exist between us that does not yet exist at all.

You like me back. I respond to something you say and plop my head between your shoulders, into the steadiness of your masculine frame.

You are shy. You think I am silly. But you stay.

Your rosy cheeks assure me more,

in ways that your mouth does not need to.

And then—

the imagination ends.

It does not force itself forward

into fantasy.

The mind practices what the heart craves to recognize.

A way to test the feeling before it exists.

I only wish to remember —those tender cords of that feeling when I am near you.

So close from across a room.

I am not imagining you. I am remembering myself.

But contemplation must come to its end. It could never replace a real connection.

In sickness or in health.

Or perhaps, it is just hope, living in the colors of the beach in my head, the seabirds screeching in the background, they’re there too, because they are needed just as much to make any dream come alive.

As my hair is full of grit and sand, on my face there’s light makeup and your stare.

The ocean remains behind us, but I see it there in front of me.The waves are moving behind the paleness in your eyes.

Maybe—even a storm.

If there is any danger to this reverie, it is not that I have imagined you to love me.

It is that I might believe

this way of loving

disqualifies me

from having the real thing.

I don’t want to imagine you forever—love. I want to wed you, in-front of seabirds.

The real ones.

And in the meantime, I’ll hide it in my heart.

Because the Maker who made the instinct to hunger for another being, resides there.