you ⇌ love
you and I had been intimately acquainted from the start, like new friends who immediately feel old and known by each other in past and future lifetimes.
i
dreamt in your language
conversations i felt to be real in my dreaming bones
observed the world through your fragile lenses, tinted
composed pensive letters with thoughts of you held softly in the crevices of my sensitive palms.
you
concocted warmth
took me back to those flushed beach days
sat quietly with me in my darkened bedroom
hunched with your knees to your chest when I grew skeptical of you
welcomed me back with forgiveness that had collected in your eyes
when I returned
to you like objects rush back
to earth.
stumbling i’ve fallen into the orbit of your arms and
i’ve fallen out of them stumbling again
believing I had to dismiss you to “find myself”
that you only existed outside of me and inside my relations to others.
i’ve come to realize
otherwise
you are not who everyone says you are
rather you defy any definition, categorization, quantification thrown at you with the force of
every human being who ever existed and
the ever expanding entropy of our world
no you, you calmly reside in the spaces
between and within
people
and that is why
it has always been you, and it always will be.
This poem was inspired by a writing exercise I did during a virtual workshop hosted by Rupi Kaur. We did a word map association, in which you start with one word and write down any associated words that come to mind. Then, you write a poem about the word, without using the original word or any of the associations. It was a thoughtful challenge that pushed me to depart from clichés and from my own comfort zone of writing. For this poem, I chose ‘love’ as the original word, an oft written topic. I have definitely felt the repetition and stuckness of writing about something that has been written on many times over. Thus, this exercise helped me to write about something I think about often, but in a new way. Lastly, I hope you can feel the emotion of love I was trying to convey through this poem, a much needed feeling during these difficult times.