welcome to my final, most epic, most

remarkable, 

poem on love.

in writing this, my heart cracked open and spilled blood and gold on our hands

my heart cracked open and this is what poured out. 

let’s start with this, love is.

love is running barefoot through fields of immense imagination, scars and warts and rashes forming on our impressionable legs, the grass ripping at our hearts.

love is pressing our names into freshly laid concrete, so the house would always remember that we were real.

love is soft smiles around a campfire, the sound of the raging river greeting our souls in the deepest way, as anticipation and memory swirl into one.

love is a sunset that splashes color on a canvas of cloud as music drifts in waves, making pine trees tremble as friends inhale to hold onto that joy for just a little longer.

love is my father who lets his son loose, not in ignorance of paternal responsibility but for it, because he knows that adventure is found between the bears, lakes and steaming, white, cracked Earth. 

love is the two in a dirty, public world as we ignore the stains and hold one another, talking absent and us, all of us, present in courage.

love is my delicate skin, the only barrier keeping my heart, lungs, stomach hell my fucking liver from bounding toward you and trapping us both with a kiss.

love is when you rock me as I sob, because though I was scared of you once, you were still the mother I needed, and the one I will always need, to feel whole.

love is the dream I had about you, the one where you were swallowed by oceans of purple flowers. 

I couldn’t smell them, but you said you could.

love is glasses of wine atop a fire escape on 23rd street

it’s my thumb as it rubs a jagged rock, 

it’s my feet in trickling snow melt, my broken, tormented insides writhing against people who said they loved me, but who i didn’t believe.

it’s laughter that soars and roars above the setting sun 

it’s the soft green glow from the clock we needed to care about (for curfew’s sake)

it’s whoops down canyons and between the red rock 

it’s chests full of fear that screams for us to be smarter.

it’s your fingers that pluck my heartstrings on your guitar.

it’s sprinklers on golf courses at dusk.

and it’s you and me

here 

together

sharing our art. 

love can be found too, you know. 

love can be found in that soliloquy i prepared for you, the gas station receipt, the quiet, unspoken spark that pushed me to ask you to the homecoming dance.

love can be found in the dirt and summer carnage on my white t-shirt.

love can be found in the basement of the dirtiest college dorm, a literal tornado raging outside, that we ignore together.

love can be found in sparks thrown into the atmosphere that roll and whiz past two sets of eyes, joining twinkling stars to observe two friends broken, and broken together.

love can be found in the rainbows that hover above pillars of spitting water raging down a mountain side, pulling me closer to them, and pulling us closer together, until we realized that we had always been one.

love can be found in that bracelet you made me, the multicolored beads and the string i broke immediately, but a love like that can’t be contained even when its pieces are lost.

love can be found in your bed on that squishy mattress topper that never stayed close to the wall, no matter how many times you hopped down and adjusted it while grinning at me.

and don’t forget, love is when, too. 

it’s when you experience time so full that is stretches you, pulls at you, morphs you and reshapes you into someone better. 

love is when friends for life let laughter rock their bodies, forgetting why they were together in the first place, as a pink sun sets its touch on the Bridgers and the river reminds us that life moves on. 

love is when my suffocated soul looks out in darkness at my creation story, nurturing, teaching, scarring, healing and all else placed in a single valley.

love is when we press our bellies to family carpets stained with memory as we inch forward to avoid hanging loops of Christmas lights while the smell of peppermint hot chocolate and the sound of Christmas carols pluck the darkness from the deepest caverns of our chests. 

love is magic. it’s the kind of magic we have all, endlessly chased and endlessly run away from until our toes ache and time makes our lungs scream.

it’s all of these moments, wrapped in words by infinite versions of me, but none of those words

not one of them

can do these moments justice.

It was surrender to a devil dressed in black that got me here

It is surrender to a stranger dressed in gray that keeps me here

And it will be surrender to love, dressed in nothing, that sets me free.