Too Many Love Letters
You are only my friend but you’ve taught me intimacy...
read or listen:
I already have more love letters to write
than any person has a right too.
I’ll need months to sit and remember each of you
in your beauty and frailty and curiosity and anger and destitution,
and then there will be more to remember.
You are only my friend but you’ve taught me intimacy through
the way light makes your eyes translucent,
your worried skin wrinkling as you squint at the day,
and your stories hinting at the mystery of your childhood
when you devoured the world
with your tiny heart.
There is no song I can make that will sing enough about you,
the way you smell and hurry through your day
moving towards that one moment
when you can finally just be,
though being is what you have always been so good at.
You have been ready for each day,
to explore, discover, be met
by whatever is here for you,
every day for so many years.
We have been here together,
you and I
on this adventure that is beyond all of our planning,
beneath skies that shake us
and call us to dance.
You have crafted a life for yourself
and I have gotten to see just one act of it,
yet I am wealthy beyond measure
because of you,
friend.
I am tucking these thoughts away,
for when I am very, very old
and I start to write love letters
to everyone who I have known,
and quietly adored,
which is to say,
you.
This is lovely.