FREEDOM
I would reach; reach out of me. I would hold my mind up; way up in the sky, where the clouds are and the blueness. Where the sun always shines and life is easy; so easy you can’t even see it.
I would dance; I would hop and scamper. I would sing and witter and I would breathe; breathe that abundant life I never knew. Sometimes I do; I do that! Sometimes I excel in the joy of all that living and loving. Sometimes I am dancing with each in and out of my breathing.
At other times; at other times I am quiet and slow and solemn and I do not hear what people are saying and though I yearn to, I have no reply to anyone’s conversation. Though I would hold your hand; though I would dip my lips to your lips and hold you crushingly, desire spinningly close, I cannot see you; not really.
I cannot because as long as I remember there has been this gap; this remove, this absence where I know nothing, feel nothing, do nothing. I do not know what the making of that gap was. In trite words I could talk of the ultimate bewilderment of red brick buildings in places whose names I did not know and children whose names I never knew. I could talk of it all; that whole tired litany but it doesn’t matter, though I thought once it did. It doesn’t matter and it never mattered: that reason.
But I know that when I yearn to be silly and when I yearn to be funny; I can feel the absence and when I yearn to talk and laugh I can feel the caution of living behind a mirror that makes everything red faced.
And yet and yet when I look at you; when I see you, when I glow just by being besides you. I do not, I do not. I sit lost for words and that connection that lets us dance for an eternity till maybe our feet bleed but we do not even notice. That lets us tickle and caress and dance around our words till our breath becomes ragged and our lips tender with swollen kisses and our bodies twined and joined.
But at those times of when my emotions are blanketed, I do not brighten. Those days when you beg for words; I hate them, only aware once you point it out to me. I blink: Yes! Once again I am not here.
Sometimes I am lost in that gap that makes it all awkward. Is that because I do not know me? I cannot see me and have no idea what people would like to see in me. Though your body weaves around me and your funniness entrances me; my own body, my mind, my absence betrays me.
At the same time that my mind is about to dance with you, I notice my lack of certainty.
And yet in the morning you still kiss me. When I get home from work you kiss me. When we snuggle for telly you kiss me and somehow, somehow I will make that dare and turn life on its head until trust is like a book you don’t need to look at and desire is like the air we breathe and love is like the certainty of the rays of the sun.
When I look at you, I see all these new certainties reflected back at me. Daring me to be free.
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