(301//365) When I left my home within you and faced the world without you and finally found the story of me that didn't involve wanting and yearning and pining, when I knew I'd wanted too much, what you couldn't give me and left everything - I didn't leave love behind. It devours me until my heart aches in longing and grief. You were like a mesa too vertical to climb. You were the smell of desert rain I couldn't inhale enough of, elusive and solemn and captivating in your intangibility. I'm still searching for the words to articulate leaving because I loved you too much, leaving because it's easier to have nothing of you than too little, leaving because I finally found a bilateral love, a home in someone else, a fullness I'd been lusting after haphazardly in a world seemingly without end. I have spent long years imprisoned by my idolatry of you and me, worshiping the unrealized dream of us and grieving my long-held hope of a revolution. I am finally free and so are you; of guilt, of obligation, of disappointment in your inability to satisfy my ravenous appetite. And I am still searching for the words of forgiveness from you and from myself for me. They linger on my tongue waiting impatiently to leap into the unsuspecting mountain sky, waiting impatiently for fear's clenched fists to loosen, waiting patiently for you. Always waiting patiently for you.
This day will not cease to mean something to me but it's no longer years of togetherness. It's the fifteenth anniversary of the day I rested my young hazel eyes on your sweet seventeen-year-old face at that corner gas station on Main Street. It was the day you rescued me from the inevitability of my broken life. It was a day of vindication and the knowledge that at that moment in time, we were as perfect as we would ever be for one another. It was the first day of the next fifteen years that would change everything. It's a day I am contented to remember fondly. It always will be.