Dear Nazareth
I figured it out today.
Not the way you figure something out when you've been working toward it—when the answer arrives because you did the math correctly and followed every step.
More like the way you figure something out when you've been actively avoiding it and your body just stops cooperating with the avoidance.
I'm in love with you.
I don't know exactly when it started. Maybe in the dining room with Paris and the cherry blossoms. Maybe the first time you kissed me. Or maybe in the shower when you showed me all your broken parts.
Maybe it was always going to be this way and the timeline is irrelevant.
What I know is that it terrifies me.
Not you. Never you.
But this—the size of it. The way it doesn't leave room for anything else. The way I catch myself planning a future in the same breath I remind myself I don't know when you're coming back. If you’re coming back.
I’m scared of how fast I fell for you even when I had every reason not to. How it feels more like compulsion than choice, this plunging toward you.
Sometimes I try to flatten it, sit on the feeling and squash it small enough to fit in my mouth so I can swallow it down and pretend it's nothing special.
It doesn’t work.
If I talk about you, it sounds like a mild case of infatuation.
If I think about you, it’s a fever. It’s the kind of love that could take everything. And I'd let it. I’d hand you every piece of me that bleeds if you asked.
Even if you didn’t.
Maybe I already have.