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jgs^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
the fear in me is bubbling up—an anxious amalgamation of the feelings that grow from being with you and being yours—but it threatens the endangered farmland that we've painstakingly tilled. for months, we've talked in circles, within the meta, of us and what "us" means, mixing the soil to prepare a planting: what a future together could be like. would it be easier for me to let you go and save you from the parts of my brain that are determined to sabotage us? can our crop withstand it?
this life is not yet abandoned, if i have any say about it; there is more to see here if we vow to push on further, but it requires explicit complicity, a shared understanding that what we are embarking on could be the best or worst of us. and yet, all i want more is time with you, any of which i can muster in the thirty-some-odd years i feasibly have left in this life.
in another, you and i are high school sweethearts. we have all the time in the world.
in this life, though, you and i have converged at a point in our lives that has been described as "late" in generations past (as i would surely have been a spinster), but for me, you arrived just on time. this version of me that you see is the culmination of heartbreaks—both done by others and myself—and frantic introspection that kept me aware of myself for a decade or more. that awareness and self-reflection now stops me short, but isn't this what working the earth does: exposing parts of the soil to the sun above to drink in the air and light?
in that exposure, twirling around my (our) living room, dancing with you, stealing moments in crowds and feeling deeply—i've almost said the three words i've been yearning to hear, to cross your lips; i've stopped myself every time. it's the final element of this equation that i keep close to my chest, because once i'm there, i'm planted in you and you'll forever have a part of me. my past self was shattered in pieces of parts of past loves; it means everything to me—so you'll have to say it first, for the both of us.
that i lo