I followed you down to the snow covered hillside and we came here as a peace offering to the caverns in our heart that desperately needed to be filled with softness. I knew you were feeling the same way as I was — when the world doesn't feel like your world. Instead, it feels like a mirror in which you don't even recognize your own reflection. A month ago, you were decorating a tree and drinking hot cider, but now, January says something unaware like playing a card game and life is always throwing you a new deck. We wanted to be reminded that although we skate across the January pavement with shaky shivering palms, this is still our world and springtime will be made all the more sweet because we've known and sang so loudly to the blues of winters beast.
My voice spoke to you with no uncertainty as I told you to listen to the birds who seemed to not notice we weren't birds too. In fact, we were so human in that moment and it is also what lead us to each other and onto this hillside. Being human after all means exactly this; to weep, to wonder, to ricochet between needing this world and wanting to run away from it. I told you that I loved you and like every other time I said it, I meant every word. All the stutters, all the ache, all the togetherness and separation that comes with saying it. Some people don't mean it like I do. They say it to you because you are so worthy of love, but they don't see the compass that turns my eyes towards you when somebody asks where is my home.
I know there is a dying light every time I part from you, and every time we part from places like the hillside. I know when you are distant from me, it is only because you have been losing sleep or because you are longing to watch the hollyhocks grow. I know winter brings with it a caravan of sleepiness and sometimes, your hands cannot mend what is expressed in your heart. More than this, I am utterly incomplete without you.
You are my bones, my belly, my mind, my feet and all of those feelings which exist in separate and strange parts. There is only one you. You are me. I am you. There is no ordinary in your vocabulary and that is why the blues bite you like you're a trout swimming through cold water. You notice things, little things where other people move on from. Sometimes, I wish I could detach from you momentarily just so I could break from thinking this much or thinking at all, but then I wouldn't be me anymore. I could survive winter, but I couldn't survive without my head.
When I rise from the bed where we both sleep, you will open the shutters to see that winter is still here. You will tell me, I will cry for a moment, but then I will make a recipe that calls for cold hands, something to warm us, something to say that the winter still has a heart for the living.
When I rise from the bed where we both sleep, you will open the shutters to see that winter is still here. You will tell me, I will cry for a moment, but then I will make a recipe that calls for cold hands, something to warm us, something to say that the winter still has a heart for the living.