I’m learning how to cement any part of my personality [this is only possible now because of you, you named me a person before i considered it myself] [[this feels harder than it should be]] to understand and decide what to like by only myself and not in the presence of other people, but it’s in the presence of others that I am faced with a blinding clarity of who I am and what I want [i wanted you. I wanted you so much that sometimes it felt physically uncomfortable.] [[like standing on a blacktop on a 97 degree day]] I call her desire and I call her on the phone. Learn what words to say to calm her down when she rages on inside of me. I like her. I like her more now than any of the shame I felt for her before. It's overwhelming, often, but I don’t want to let her go anymore. I know her better than I know my own name. [I know where her hands go in the dark, I know how her name can fill up a room] [[I know she’ll always pick up when I call]] And it seems like I was taught that yearning was a right earned exclusively by youth. That the idea of desire and romantic obsession was juvenile and immature [the way that I have been brushed off with a schoolgirl crush] The idea of a crush is diminished by a closed minded view of both age and lust. I want all that grows more desirable with age, the intimacy between two people that can only be achieved with time, something I find myself longing for so desperately in my youth, to sit across the living room from the person you have grown half your life with, to know the sounds they make throughout the day, the break in their snores, their gasp in a dream, the groan of their knees as they crawl out of the bed, the rush of piss hitting the water first thing in the morning, the washing of their hands, the spit up extra glob of toothpaste in the sink, the coffee filling the pot before they break the silence of routine to ask if you’d like a cup. I am envious of age, of monotony, of it’s rhythm, of the sureness of another person in the room when I wake up. I’m jealous of what it might feel like to be comfortable in my own company, and to be comfortable knowing no one else is going to walk in the door after me when I get home. I am sad, maybe a lot of the time, a predicament of my age I am sure and perhaps also the age of the world I ended up being placed in. I’m alive in a blip of the short lived miracle [I am crushed by it] I think it’s a symptom of our situation that we are all faced with a certain sadness to our life, everyday it seems more and more of our futures are taken out of our control. I wake up everyday and it is rare I see a world that feels inherently hopeful.Often times I convince myself the only thing hopeful about the state of my future is the fact that I am continuously living into it. And maybe that is all a part of what it means to be alive in this moment, to see feral joy as an act of rebellion I am alive And I’m grieving And I’m screaming And I’m making out, open mouthed with strangers on a sweat slicked floor, in crowds of bodies lit up by neon lights I can see glimpses of it all as they flash on and off I am falling in love, hopelessly, in more ways than one and I want all of it I want to desire with a sense of hope I want to desire with an intention of life behind it I want to yearn unabashedly for other people and I want them to hold me with both hands and look me in the eye and we don’t need to say anything, we will just have each other in our arms reaching out for a brief second of tender loving joyous embrace and when I stumble home drunk in a search for the bathroom light [I know you] [[It was always you]] with your eyes in the mirror staring back at mine I love you I don’t know if you need to hear this but I love you just the same.