Before you came around, I thought the sweater on my back looked just fine. I thought my impossibly swept hair would survive the mediocrity of it sitting on my troubled head. I longed for nothing. I hungered for nothing, because I’d tasted it all. Before my eyes had the misfortune of tracing the outsides of your lips I could sit quietly and happily in my own solitude, disrupted only by the swelling tides of the sea outside my door, and nothing more. I was a man, tamed. Spent my life breathing cautiously, and fearing the late-night hours and what thoughts they would invite. If sadness were to subdue my restless heart, I would write poems, not of love, but of great places my feet were yet to meet, and sing the blues long enough to cool the jets of a primitive man. Impressively, I gathered encyclopedic data of all the things you ought to know at my age, and in turn, published only the most riveting narratives from the honest-to-goodness truth about youth and young manhood. I sank into satisfaction and pride, uninhibited. The burdens of the lust-bitten many were a pile of bricks. But I was free of the toil, and the failures of love- at least I thought. Before you, there were days spent endlessly in the silent sands. There were the ghost-cries of Whitman, Thoreau and Hemingway. There was all the bed a man could want to stretch out like a cat in the shade, and with abandon to wake with my eyes swollen from whiskey with no mirrors to tell me otherwise.
Before you, there was me.
And there you were, like a pastry I’d never previously had an appetite for. Almost immediately did my body crave sweet saccharin like a lazy child. My limbs had softened, and on every inch of the skin that wrapped it- goose bumps, like a frigid breeze washed over me and suddenly, January took the place of May. My eyes- unblinkable, not wanting to miss a moment of the film playing before me. And my whole self cracked at once straight down the middle, and only half of it withstood the blow of your beauty. There I was, a half-man, at the mercy of an infinite woman. At once, my dreams would be replaced by only you, and your smell would be the smell of every room I entered. Your voice on the end of every telephone and your eyes only in a crowded room that seemed a hollow space in your presence. I was, like all fools, cruelly, and unfailingly in love.
My attempts to avoid the tease of a woman’s skin were obliterated by my first touch. It was wholly unfair, the more of you I had, the less I recognized my own face. I began as a whole man, ripped gleefully in half, and as each day passed, less and less of me remained. I didn’t think to care, for what was there to care in the company of perfection? But I, myself, was exceedingly inadequate, and knew that all too well. My once ferocious heart beat softer when I was around you. My ugliness grew, and in the place of my vital handsomeness grew an intrusive jungle of hair that rest on my bloated chest. What had become of me?
Before you, I knew all the world’s wisdom, and now I am a man who knows nothing. And now, I’m racing and retracing my steps, wondering how something so explosive lay so dormant in my insides. Something that I couldn’t have imagine existed, until it emerged in it’s own fury. This force, this fatal beast that would kill, or worse- at the thought of the loss of you. From where, does such a demon enter?
And now you are gone, left my broken and twisted. Mangled, and bruised. Unrecognizeable, from my once common-folk self.
You, my dear, are the hurricane they warn us of.
