The Address I Carry

A small blue spark found me first, ordinary December, an unremarkable year, a message struck like a match held out across a distance neither of us had a name for yet. I did not go looking for you with my feet along any road. The machines of this century do the walking now, but the old hunger underneath is unchanged: one animal recognizing another animal in the dark, and saying, here, at last, is a face I was already walking toward. For a long while we were only words, passed back and forth like coins that might or might not be spent. Whole seasons folded themselves between our words, the way a country folds itself quietly between two languages, waiting to be opened again. I did not let go of the thread. I wrapped it small and kept it warm, close to the chest, because some fires are better built slow, from embers carried a long way before they are allowed to catch. When you finally stood in front of me a second time, unhidden, unhurried, the whole of you, a country I wanted to walk barefoot through, I learned your shoulders the way I was once taught prayer, by repetition, until the words stopped needing translation and simply became flesh. I have been trained to notice the breath and let it go. This breath, I confess, I wanted to keep. I met a tree once that stood entirely alone and needed nothing from any other tree to be whole, and for one full minute I envied it, before I remembered I would rather be a man who needs than a trunk that doesn't, and I broke off a small green piece of you instead, to carry in rooms where you are not, proof that somewhere, right now, that particular tree is still growing. Ours is not a love that announces itself in the street, and you still hold my hands sometimes. Our love lives instead inside small errands: a bag of bread carried home in the rain, a bright aisle of a shop where we cannot agree what to eat, the same question asked and answered a dozen small ways before dinner is finally decided. I have learned you in the most unholy rooms, at the tired edge of a bed, in a kitchen where the rice has caught and you swear softly in a way that makes me laugh out loud. This is temple enough for me. I do not require a mountain. I require only your hand finding mine under a table while the room talks on, unaware. When you are gone even one night, my hands still go looking for you across the sheets the way a plant turns, without deciding to, toward a light it only remembers. I have written you across whole oceans in words too small to hold the feeling, good morning, sleep well, I miss you, and somehow each small word has carried everything. The entire history of longing, I have come to think, is only this. A body remembering another body, and refusing, gently, to forget it. Now you have started saying the word that turns two rooms into one house, offering me a key that has not been cut yet, a chair at a table before either of us has quite finished becoming who will sit there. I do not know yet what shape our years will take. I only know I would rather build them slow and honest than borrow somebody else's blueprint. So let this be the record, in case anyone asks, ages hence, what it looked like when I loved without flinching. It looked exactly like this. Ordinary, unhurried, complete. A stranger who stopped being a stranger, and became, instead, the address I carry inside me wherever else I go. You have taken to calling you treasure in a tongue neither of us was born speaking to the other, a small green word I did not grow up owning, and I have carried it since, tucked into my chest pocket like a coin from a country I had not yet visited. I come from a country that keeps its dead close and teaches them to dance once a year, that hangs marigolds like a second set of stars each November so the ones we love can find their way home. I was taught early that nothing holds its shape forever. I tell you this without contradiction. Some things change, and are still, somehow, the truest thing I know. Call me whatever you like. I will answer to any name, in any tongue, as long as it is you doing the calling. I ll just ask, if I may, don’t take from me that address, that’s the only place I found home. Let me carry the words and the address, let me age holding your hand, let me call you mo stor one more time…