September 21, 2009
If you can wait til I get home…
The greatest thing you will ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.
I’ve got a reminder of you wrapped around me, entangling me, every second of everyday, and it’s driving me crazy. And I’m going to take it everywhere I go with me, for the rest of my life. It’s going to see everything I see, and do everything I do.
Someone else will try to hold my hand, and I’ll sit there quietly, feeling nothing but the ache in my heart of wishing that someone was you. Someone else will try to kiss me, and maybe I’ll let them, but all I’ll taste is your mouth. Someone else will try and love me, and I’ll shut them out, push them away, because I’ll have no heart to give them.
What do I say when I don’t even know myself when we’re not together? I pass through my days and nights with no regard for time and space, waiting for what? I need you to tell me what I’m waiting for. It’s starting to feel like I’m waiting on a ghost. Like I’m a war widow who sits at the window every night, waiting for the love that’s never coming home.
Which is funny. Because you’re only a phone call away. All I have to do is grab the phone and I can hear your voice again. I can hear your smile through the line. And it still tugs at my heart that you knew my voice that morning I finally called. So what’s stopping me now? Why don’t I pick it up? I wish I knew. I wish I could tell you every reason I have for pressing my lips together to keep the words from tumbling out.
What if I have nothing left to give myself because I’m giving it all to you? Would I stay? If you asked me, would I stay? I know I would. And that scares me. I am so willing to scrap my plans, on the small glimmer of hope that you’ll whisper my name, hold my hand, that I can wake up to see your eyes staring back at me every morning.
Could they forgive me? Could I forgive myself? Could we have that old movie kind of love, where we kiss with our toes in the surf and make each other absurd little promises and talk in murmurs only we can hear, so no one can tell us we’re wrong? No one can tell us this is just a dream, a product of wishful thinking. Their voices float up and never reach our ears.
I’ll trace the lines of your fingers with mine and smile, and I’ll remember why it is I set out to do what I’m doing. I’ll know with a breaking heart that I have to leave you. Even if it hurts you, even if it doesn’t affect you at all, the outcome is the constant. I have to leave you. No words have ever scared me more.
I have to leave you, but I will always come back. And maybe we can pick up where we left off, maybe the setting and the scenery will be the same, maybe the little reminders I have of you will be enough to get me by.
Or will they stretch my lonliness across six painful years until we’re strangers? Will it become just another memory of something wonderful we could have had? Are we star crossed? Or are we just blind?
Will it matter in the end? When I step off that plane, and you look into my eyes, will you know me? I need you to tell me nothing will change. I need you to lie to me right now, to give me faith, give me hope, give me some peace so I can sleep tonight. So I can dream of when this is all over, the dust has settled, and there we are, and you’ll wipe away my tears, and you’ll see it there, the same place it’s always been, and you’ll know, I never really left at all.
If you can wait til I get home, then I swear to you that we can make this last. If you can wait til I get home, then I swear come tomorrow, this will all be in the past.
