Gasp. I can feel again.
I held my hand on my heart several times to make sure it wasn't a false alarm. I knelt to the ground, and counted my breath. I dimmed the lights. And I put on my headphones to listen to that song with the attention it truly deserved. It was just some song, and I had played it a million times over the last year, and it promptly did nothing.
But now, now, now, now, now I could suddenly feel the floodgates open, and if I listened closely, somewhere in the thunder, the storm, the ocean, I could almost hear the flutter of a butterfly. It felt like I had injected the lyrics into my bloodstream, and now I could feel every curve, every beat, every rhythm, every edge of the song. I could feel why this song was written, its very purpose, who it was probably about, and how pure the love in the air that night was.
Gasp. I can feel again.
I was drowning, and now I can breathe again. Something had brought me back to the shore, and now I am alive.
Now I want to run, I want to run to the highest point in the city, and watch the city lights and lose myself in a few hundred daydreams. I want to go to large parties, and talk to a cute stranger all night and go home with the taste of his kiss on my lips, and his fingerprint on my neck. I want to skinny dip in the ocean and befriend a dolphin and eat ice cream at the beach on a hot sunny day.
And when I do any of that, I want to feel like I'm falling and I want to be utterly, defiantly, irrevocably unafraid of the fall. I want to want to fall. I want to love the fall.
Gasp. I can feel again.
I want to scream into the interstellar space that I love my friends so very much, until my voice breaks into a constellation, my love spangled like stars in the sky, in permanence, forever.
I want to buy a box of chocolates with twenty four different flavors and wine for my favorite people, go dancing with them, and hug them a little too tight on rooftops, drunk on a few coffee flavored cocktails and fully inebriated by this feeling.
I want to hug every one in my family individually and cry on their shirts and tell them I love them so very dearly, and how much they mean to me, maybe for the first time, because we just seem to sit on this feeling a little too much.
Gasp. I can finally feel you.
You.
The one who doesn't exist.
But you always have. In my head, you've always been here.
My love for you has always been here. Stored away in a container with seemingly infinite space, and still overflowing, always. Now the distance between us, it's infinite space. And yet my cup filleth up and spilleth over.
And I can finally feel you.
For so long, I haven't let myself want you.
But I do. I want to kiss you hard by the Tower Bridge and not care if people are watching. I want to hold hands and walk all over the city. I want to have a jump in my step just because I'm so fucking happy to be near you, around you, with you. I want to cocoon in your arms after a long hard day at work. I want to come home to you.
And I'm finally letting myself feel it all.
I used to think loving someone was a sign of weakness, so I hid my love and buried it in the sands of reality.
But I realize now that my love, this feeling, is what makes completely ordinary things, unfathomably extraordinary. My love is what makes you special, it is what makes anything special. If not, it's just a song, it's just a dolphin, it's just a box of chocolates. This feeling turns it into poetry.
This love, this feeling, is my heartbeat.
There's no point fighting it anymore.
This is what keeps me alive... this is who I really am. And this is my strength.
Gasp, I see that now.
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