I rent a place on Cornelia Street, I say casually in the car. We were a fresh page on the desk, filling in the blanks as we go.
I don’t exactly remember how it began. But what I do glimpse sometimes, breaking through the fog of hastily developed photographs, are messy collisions in the middle of a foreign campus, stolen stars a languid kaleidoscope in your eyes, shy first impressions and mumbled offers for breakfast pancakes; I can only recall saying yes. Years later, I am sitting here with the scarlet skyline rising to my right, washing our room in a watered―down semblance of sunlight. You’re still tangled into our sheets, the cosmos I yearned for stamped into your skin. My darling, I slide my eyes shut and take myself back through time, nostalgic as I wait for the world to rouse from slumber.
You hold my hand on the street. Walk me back to that apartment
You come back seven full moon cycles later, standing on that same porch where I wrenched my heart out of my chest. I wasn’t planning on answering but my sleep―addled brain flung open the door before I could recognize the cadence of your knocks. I am petulant, lovestruck, spiralling through a spectrum of unbridled emotion―you step over the threshold, on your heels a shower of gold falls through the doorway, raindrops clinging to the curve of your eyelashes whose sensation of feathery grazes my skin still has memorized. I take a step back only to find myself allured into taking two forward instead, drawn in by the amalgamation of all the wishes I had pinned to the sky. Unfettered hope ignites a flame behind the shutters of your eyelids, your mouth glossed over in a damp sheen like pure particles of temptation; I let you fit your body over mine like puzzle pieces reuniting, let me confess to myself and the demons beneath my bed how much I’ve missed moulding myself to all your curves and dips and idiosyncrasies.
“Stay, please”
“I am not leaving you again.”
We were just inside―barefoot in the kitchen sacred new beginnings that became my religion
It feels like I would love anything you give me. I love the way you’re an absolute nightmare to try and wake up in the morning. I love how I have to set two alarms, one ages before the other to have sufficient time to drag you away from the claws of some enticing dreamscape and in time for whatever plans we’ve made for the day. I love how I have to perch myself on the balls of my feet when I lean up to kiss you, I love how after we break apart you’re always complaining about how your neck is sore and, “Really, why couldn’t you be a little bit taller?”. I love the way when I jump onto you and wrap my legs around your waist, you yelp and stumble us over to the nearest surface to collapse onto, sometimes you fall short and we crash to the floor in a shrieking heap of uncontrollable laughter and limbs wedged in awkward angles. I love how you scream louder than I do on rollercoasters, how your childlike disposition still shines through when you’re interlocking our fingers firmly just to drag me over to lively carousel littered with screeching kids. I love how we both take our coffee inordinately sweet, and the way we skip proper meals just to gorge ourselves on bag after bag of large fries until the taste grows dull on our tongues and salt grains form clustered constellations on our fingertips. I love how some nights we’ll push the couch and coffee table aside to pitch a flimsy canvas tent and drape fairy lights all around in the middle of our living room, trading secrets between our mountain of pillows like pressed flowers, childhood memories like carefully preserved fossils.
I get mystified by how this city screams your name; if you ever walk away, I’d never walk Cornelia Street again
it’s impossible to not adore you, when every time you open your eyes it’s like we’re meeting for the first time all over again―it’s impossible to not adore you when every time you kiss me it’s just like the very first heated, impassioned press of lips again. How could I not adore you, when my heart has decided to choose you every single sun-soaked morning―how could I ever not want to?
The bed shifts under the slide of a body moving across the sheets and I flutter my eyes open, your disoriented gaze smiling at me in the drowsy dawn. My love takes a stroll down Cornelia Street; it comes back with arms even more open and whispers that it’d still rather stay right here.
