I’ve tried to count the reasons that I love you.

Arranging the red, blue, and yellow M&M’s so that I could

colour code the way you make my spine shake all its leaves.

So that I could make sense of why my heart, even after it rots, and breaks, and bleeds, always find it’s way back again.

I have loved many times before,

but this time I am not gutted.

I am not barren.

I am not penniless.

I am not stale.

And I know that I have said this so many times, I could go blind: but this time it’s different. 

I think I love you because you do not put hot sauce on your food before you offer me a bite.

Because you know my favourite kind of chocolate, even when I didn’t.

Because you ears are endless tunnels of listening. Of nodding. Of relentless understanding.

Because your voice, late at night against the pillow soothes me like chamomile tea.

Because you know just how to fuck me. 

Gentle and strong.

Because you always like my hair, and you tell me that I look great, and late at night, when I am completely vulnerable before you, and every bruise of every man who once broke my heart, is lit up only by the street lamps peaking through my windows, you trace my body with your perfect hands and you tell me that I am the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. 

I think I love you because you taste like poetry.

Because you are poetry. 

Because you write me little speckles of poetry that are more like little speckles of your heartstrings woven into words. 

And I don’t know how I ended up here yet again.

But every time you roll over in the middle of the night and grab me tighter-I think to myself that I’ve never felt more ignited. That I have never felt more wanted.

More worshipped.

And maybe it was the way you looked at me at dinner-like I was the only woman in the city that could ramble aimlessly about child acting and family quarrels. 

Or maybe it was when you grabbed my hand and stroked the branches of my fingers when we both knew that that talk was about exactly about us.

Perhaps it was the time we were drunk and in bed on a Tuesday, and everything about the week, and the world, and my accumulating bills, and whether or not I was going to make rent, went entirely still, and I just wanted to taste the wine on your tongue for the 10th time that hour. 

Maybe I love you because I linger every time I have the slightest chance to hear the pebbles in your voice. Or at the slightest chance that you will catch my eye, and the world will shrink into the scope of your gaze, and my knees will tingle, and my pelvis becomes fluid, and my heart does somersaults, and jumping jacks and back flips. 

I don’t know how I ended up here again. 

But I do know, that if lovers were bodies of water, we would be the greatest of lakes. 

-b