It’s funny, I’ve got this pain in the back of my mouth where my wisdom teeth were, and only since the surgery can I recognize that as the area where love goes first when it leaves the trappings of the heart. She was the one who told me this, it was there bubbling for her when I was brave and let it out. Only brave because I saw it in her face, only brave because for a moment I could read it in her mind.

I feel my face, swollen and gaping at the backs of my gums, and I am two-thousand-something miles away from her cut open and lying face up like there’s something more than the decades-old paintgrooves in the ceiling of my childhood bedroom. I’ve been imagining her healing like she would if I were there. In this week alone she is a figment, something of a projection like I always thought love would be before I came for the first time to know it.

Love for the longest time was a canvas too often unpainted. I saw and I painted far off futures and a story of a subject that had so rarely been anything but myself. Love and anxiety have always been synonymous, a catastrophized forced fitting always for two. It was a major change, it was conceived of in my brain, a storytelling brain, a brain wired for narrative and unreality, a brain raised on television and that sometimes false narrative that my parents chose to share with my brother and I about theirs, the love that I was born into. Love for the longest time was the start to fulfillment, like the key to some perfect self that I’d conceived for my future. Love for the longest time was a projection, some inexperienced place for me to go when I felt as though I had failed: failed to manufacture the healthier brain that I’d always imagined for myself. Love for the longest time was a crutch, and now she is two-thousand miles away and I am wide open bleeding lying on the bed in the room where I grew up, and I am yearning and my unfulfillment is my own and I am ambition burning hot so I scar, and all that is mine alone and I am happy. Love for the longest time was a coping mechanism, today it is tender, open and vulnerable like the holes in my gums, healing like the spot where I first felt the word in my gums.

In its false moments, love is an action and an asking for everything. I know now that it can’t be so subsuming. I’ve tried, I tried for a moment when I first met her but she wouldn’t allow it. Love is not losing oneself, no matter how intoxicating that idea might be when she is as she is and skin is such a burden and even days away are like something less than living.

It all feels now like it’s a lot like faith, it is found in the striving. Unclutchable, she remains something as separate as she was the day that I met her. I can share in her light, take her joy and her pain as my own, and I can love her and she will never be mine. It all feels now like it is something to share in, and I love her and she loves me and there is room for the breeze and the birds, the pine two-thousand miles away from her sunny Boston day. Beyond intimacy, the shedding of skin is more of an opening up, to the room and the night and to her and for the sake of the songs she sings and the ones I hum. They are separate songs, dancing different dances, close and connected by the love of the air, she and I and everything else, it’s a secret that we all are one, and she and I alone are let in on the whisper of the air that we say we hate when we are close, the air that now is connecting us from two-thousand-something miles away.

I said My Love, and I liked the way that it sounded because it started from the back, like the wounds I hold now that she could kiss and heal but for now I will settle for the kiss of the wind. I said My Love but in the same moment I recognized, articulated for myself for what may be the first time, that nothing is Mine. She is hers and I am the blue of the sky and the river. One day I will teach her to fly fish. One day, days will pass and I hope they do, but her love will never be Mine and I hope, like striving, like ambition, like faith, that it is never to me something that I feel like I alone am able to grasp. It is deepened in its sharing, and still I alone share with her my own specific kind of love. Encompassing all, it is infinite in its forms and everlasting as a spillage of something that will never run dry. The river is ripe with trout, and one day when I teach her we will learn to throw back whatever we catch. The beauty in the casting, the line against the sun, is more than enough for me, for her, for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

It’s funny, and maybe none of this is making any sense, but I write and the words are coming easy. For the first time in a long time, I don’t care. I can hear my workshop groups now: “Unclear,” “Qualify this,” or “Render that.” But I’m writing fast and easy because it feels I am writing in a language I share. Maybe it’s this other wavelength, birds and trout and the riverrush that loves without conceptualizing love. There is no narrative in the life of the moon, the bondage of living under the existence of the sun, there is no narrative but that which is lived, that which is accepted as it comes tiny under the scope of the sky. I think of her in terms larger than that which has always made me so self-important. Songs that we share are not ours alone, but they are mine for the moment I’m allowing myself the hypocrisy, and she sings and the world keeps turning and together we are in it.

Together we are not deceived, but opting into a shared universe of expanse and expanse that ignores that some things collapse. Everything is tradition, and we are not inventing but iterating on all these things that predate us, this kernel of the feeling that allowed us into the world.

Some of this is hypocritical, in the same breath that I say she isn’t a projection, I imagine a life. And skin is a burden except when I’m with her and it is something to feel.

And she is down pacified in the bed with her mother, and I at the same time am shoved in close with mine. I am in the middle of the bed, my mother on one side and my father on the other. They lay on their sides, both turned to watch while I sleep. Awake, my eyes are shut and I’m letting them think, and all that time her and her mother are wide awake. Women with questions, they are hunkered in like my father and mother and I so she is infantilized.

There is no limb, no mutation muscle to save you when your mother tells you she hates you: your apartment and the bed that you made special for her arrival. That she hates your cooking, your coffee, the way you live now that you are out from the shadow cast beneath the spread of her wings.

My own reminds me that she loves me. She cries going to sleep and she holds me encompassing like I’d never grown to double her size. Tears dry, she waits, breathing careful breaths, and I’m letting her think, accepting her remembrance as, for the moment, my reality.