if you wanted

i see things in you, you know?  maybe that is why i like you in the first place, because i see the same longing inside you that i feel inside me, that exists as part of me. i feel your longing as resignation, an evening vesper said to no one and everyone all at once. 

there’s this way about you, magnetic, needy, but also closed. you keep things inside and choose to not explain, and that reminds me of how i do the same. 

a container, rather than its contents. 

i think that’s why i find myself captivated because the pain inside me recognizes that same pain within you. somehow it’s comforting to me, in a weird sick way, to know that others ache like i ache. maybe that’s what happens when you spend your life feeling like a freak and feeling so deeply, when it seems like everyone is running around carefree and easy money, easy street, easy pussy. 

some are born to sweet delight, it’s true, but for me and my endless night, it’s never been that way. 

i hear it too, you know, in the things that you say, the words you write (or don’t) because i know how to listen. maybe you aren’t even aware of how you speak or the weight of your words. 

it’s in the back and forth and our play, this drama we enact and i hope you see me seeing you and that perhaps you see me too. do you think of me and my two hands and my dark hair and easy smile, the jokes i tell to hide the horror?

i want to love you, maybe i already do, but not like a lover, not like that, but like family, like a sibling. were we not weaned together on the same exhaustion of this life?

can you speak my language of omens and dreams and feel the heartbeat and the grief and the rage or do you just seem like you can, seem like you would?

i write letters to you that i don’t send and i burn them to ashes over beeswax candles in my kitchen sink. i rehearse things i want to say to you in my toothpaste splattered bathroom mirror but i keep my mouth shut around you. 

i can’t tell you that i see you, so i write secrets instead and hide them inbetween stanzas and lyrics hope you feel this knowing that i witness. i witness without consumption and without possession too because i don’t want to possess or consume you. i just want you to know that i see and hope maybe it will comfort those uneasy parts of you. 

i bear witness, its what i was called to do. 

but, do you witness me back?

maybe it is foolish, this desire, this want. 

maybe it is unfair to hope for this from you. 

i don’t want to posses you, no, but i want easy conversation and this witnessing. i want a kitchen table late night laughing until our sides hurt and we feel medicated and refreshed even though it’s 0400 and the candles have burnt low and we ate all the food and smoked too many cigarettes in the garden. 

i would take you to my favourite places and perhaps they would enrich you like they enrich me, heal you as they heal me. 

but maybe that’s stupid too. 

expectation leads to disappointment, better to not expect things, better to not desire them, this i know, dharma bum, dharma punk, this i know. 

but isn’t it human to want just a little. 

isn’t it chaste and humble to seek mutual witnessing. 

i could love you, you know.

if you wanted.