1_20210418_JeffreysSt

Cracking Fortress

This is the third phone call I’ve answered from you within the past hour.

Me in the middle of dinner trying to digest our spoiled conversation,

And you in the middle of both trying to clean some counter

and the mess we are making in front of us.

Your voice lowers, cracks with uncertainty,

And asks “why did you even choose me?”

I take a deep breath, frustrated, wondering how you didn’t know,

But then, I realize maybe I never really told you,

And when your love asks, I will answer each time,

I will always try again.

You see when you met me,

My heart was five-thousand miles away,

When you met me I was not a person,

I was a fortress, deflecting,

Self-preserving something, waiting for nothing.

You had not known I had done this a thousand times,

There was nothing you could do to crack me,

And you said, me too.

Both stuck, we made a weird connection,

Talked about how being open is better than opening up.

You’d play your guitar and perform,

the mattress on your bedroom floor your stage,

With me and our clothes strewed on the carpet your audience,

We would sip on white claws and laugh that we wouldn’t fall for this cliche.

But I fell in the love the way you tune your guitar,

We hit all the wrong notes, twisting and turning and unsure,

and then suddenly 

Your voice is tuned to the same frequency as my heartbeat

That I cannot speak,

That my skin shivers because it dances to the strums of your guitar,

You are singing the song I had forgotten the words to so long ago

But would never forget its beat.

This fortress never had a key but like an earthquake,

your reverberations shook me.

You ask me why I chose you,

And I wonder if there is a word for finally embracing

something set in motion a billion years ago.

One time you fell into my arms and cried for hours,

I had never seen this side of you before, I was not sure what to do,

But when you laid your body against this rocky shore,

with gates keeping everything at bay.

I learned it’s not you who should get tougher,

It’s me who should get softer,

I had forgotten in my locking of doors, building of walls,

hardening of heart, the truest depths of myself

that could love a person as beautiful as you.

I was so afraid of breaking, but now I see that this cracking

is just creating space to let someone in.

So come in, come here, come cry to me, come to

where a fortress once lied and is now just

the same level of ground we are walking.

I did not know where those tears came from,

and I need not know, but I know where they would go every time.

Into my fingertips, a bucket to catch the stories

that fall from your eyes, aching to be heard.

Grateful the way they run down my soil hands,

the way a seed thanks the rain for coming to be watered

And grows in my understanding of you

Grows stronger to help carry this load,

Grows phantom limbs that will stretch 

across the time and space to embrace you.

Don’t worry, I will find my way to you,

The way a sunflower always finds its way to look at the sun.

You ask why I chose you,

And I ask why when I trace the etches of once

stranger’s hands, I find a roadmap back to home.

It tells of unsent yellow letters, the dreams you let go,

scars from when instead of comfort, you explored the unknown,

And somewhere between the calluses and moles,

you hold me the way I came into this world,

Your arms, a starting line of a journey back to myself.

I find I am healing, 

I find I want to do better for you.

I find you inspire me to do better for myself,

So you ask why I chose you,

I wonder if there is a word for that I just feel alive when I’m with you,

I am no longer a fortress, I am a person. Here for you.

Because I love you.