where skies are blue

When I was living in Arizona I met one of the most fantastically wonderful people I’ve ever known. A guy that would call me when he went cliff jumping. One that would drive me miles just to watch a desert sunset. One that smiled until his eyes crinkled in the corners and his face shone like a full moon in a cloudless sky. And I remember thinking that if every moment were like this: so extraordinarily simple, I could stay just like this forever, never moving, never thinking, never struggling.

I went to his family’s farm in Alabama for a few days when the hurricanes were building and the cows were birthing and all I wanted was more daylight. For the pure days to grow slowly longer and longer until sleep became a mystery and a fog of life was all you could see.

Sitting on the airplane back west, my heart felt swollen and uncomfy in my chest. As though all the laughs and the hugs, the jokes and the smiles buried themselves within my core just to explode and bring me an orange burst of gratitude made from the crystal tears of my green eyes. And in that moment no feelings or words could justify nor clarify the messy confusing, perfectly pure and simple joy of loving someone so wonderful.

The best time to love is always now. The art of being the gift, being broken and given is actually a stimulus for the longest cranial nerve, traveling from the brain to the stomach, the nerve that literally warms the heart. It makes me wonder… maybe we never have to be afraid of speaking and listening, needing and wanting, being a gift and embodying kindness.

I’m wearing a shirt that supports bees, matching my bumble bee mask and making my eyes seem small in comparison. It made me realize that life can be so extraordinarily crunchy to human hearts. It has the tendency to circulate its love, as though recycling venom, in and out of the people you come in contact with. The most reassuring and equally unsure feeling is loving someone and wanting to live alongside them. I have grown very uncomfortable in this feeling of wanting and not wanting. The twisting discomfort, I’ve learned, is just a testament of a living heart that holds the ultimate and most true capacity of a human’s capabilities: love.