I Remember Before

I was anything, I was everything, or nothing.

“I remember it like a dream, do you?”

‘Haha, no not really, maybe it was warm? What do you remember?’

“Yeah yeah, warm. It was warm. I get that sense too.”

‘Do you ever want to go back?’

“What do you mean, won’t we anyway?”

‘Well, yes I suppose… I guess I just mean… if you miss it or anything, that maybe you would want to-’

“Oh sure like ‘Go back’ sooner?”

‘Yeah, sooner.’

“No. Well, yes. Sometimes.”

‘So what was it like, everything else going on’

“Oh! Sure, let me think a little, I could go all the way back or-”

‘Yeah, tell me everything.’

How do I tell her I love her, without scaring her away? The weight of the wait that someday I may feel this feeling again, and be ready. She may be the most unremarkable being to walk this earth, but then I would be too. A match made in where, purgatory? Love in this dying wasteland, she may be the last of the beauty, my last hope for humanity, the first dandelion that rises from irradiated concrete in the aftermath of a nuclear winter.

I mean the melodrama is off-the-charts, would you believe me if I told you there was a world beneath our feet with a pulse? The way it feels to lay on your chest indistinguishable from the all-enveloping embrace of the soil. The same rise and fall of breath, the infinite intricacies of organic life in designed flux just barely separate from my skin. I would converse with the trees if we shared a common tongue, but we do.

Yet mysterious, perhaps the love of balance between knowing enough and all-too-much at any given moment. That a third date is too early to share some of our struggles. So in fantasy land we enjoy the company, then I turn to ask, how did you get here? And if I am lucky, your whole life’s tales will come out in bits and pieces, put together in a mosaic in both our minds, created as I listen and you speak. I am as jagged and impossible to placate as can be, searching for a the piece of a puzzle that doesn’t exist yet.

Would you smooth my edges? Would our relationship mold us to fit, or push us even farther apart? There isn’t anywhere to go but down, but I remember before. And before I was everything, I wanted to be a part of you, so I came to earth to find you, to feel the cold and freeze only to thaw in the summer of your smile. Melting in your eyes I cry as an unworthy recipient of your love inter-planar.

I feel it alone, I feel it in the dark. I feel it in the air and in a crowd, in the ground and in the sound. You move me, and I pray for the strength you bestow in me, and when I am too weak to pray my legs rise and I tackle another day. And when I am too weak to sing you regale me with wind whistling past my ear, and when I am to the moon elated with your love it was you who put me there when there was nothing before. What cruelty, what joy, what misery and grief with all the love I have and nowhere to put it. It spills around me and drowns strangers in it. I hate them. Stealing what is yours, what you had given me to give to you.

I remember before, you and I were not separate, and neither was the love, and neither were the strangers, and neither was the stardust, and neither was the amniotic fluid, and neither were the comets that populated our primordial oceans with the bacterium that would become us. And when we were us, and what you ate flowed through me, life was birthed and severed us in two. So that now I spend the days walking home, alone. And I meet the strangers and we drink and eat, and I read the stories and share our poetry and prose. And when I am surrounded by love I forget how alone we are, and when I am alone I long to be together. And when we are together, a part of me wishes to go back to before, without the complexities.

How to tell a stranger you love them without scaring them away, that we need each other like plants need sun and fish need water. And before people were here to need each other, we just were each other, which was ourselves, which was everything without contrast, which was all dark or all light, which was nothing. It was taken for granted, which it was granted to be taken. Once took, the butterflies flew and created tornadoes and the sun born to fusion created Jupiter.

Mighty Jupiter, which saved us from harm, which protected us. The Sun, which allowed us existence. The Earth, that bore our lives. The moon, which pushes and pulls the tides, the diversity of life created in an eternal flash. The amalgam of all its beauties in your eyes, running down the length of your back. I hear it in your chest, the blood flowing and the bustle of the cellular metropolis in your bosom. The garden of eden placed in your belly, the remarkable gait of our bipedal mode, the unending creation of what makes you remarkably unmistakably irrevocably and irreverently you.

This I must find out, this I must cherish. And how not to blow it up. But, if it’s not you, then it’s me. And if it blows up, maybe that’s how it was meant to be. I am so scared I could cry. And I do.