I (WISH I COULD) KNOW YOU
In my dream, you were letting go. In my dream, you were crying in my arms. We were in a forest, by a brook, and I held you, whispering comforting nothings, because what else was there to do? I held you, in the only way I knew how, in a clumsy jumble of limbs that would never be enough — it was everything, but it would never be enough until my arms wrapped around and around your body and cocooned you entirely. Until we were one, intertwined so that not a single atom could worm its way between us.
You took my hand in yours and began to trace patterns into my palm with a finger. It felt like you were carving the lines into my skin. Countless cells dying and shedding, countless cells born. I felt the fluttering pulse in your wrist, watched the slight rise and fall of your chest as you breathed, as we breathed the same air. Alive. Alive.
In my dream you spoke, in that soft way you speak that sounds like a living song.
“I know you.”
I’m going to be confessional, like the poet I try to be, stitch a patchwork of compulsions as they burst out from the reams and folds and blinking neurons and swelling hormones inside of me, and offer them up to you. Because the core of it all is you.
Beautifully undefinable you. I can’t think of you as anything but yourself, the world in a body, though I see you everywhere, in every little burst of beauty, in moon-shadows and autumn leaves, the cloud of birds beyond my window that move as a body, the colours blue and purple, the sea foam on my cup of coffee, the dew on a Sunday morning, the rich light from the rising and falling sun spilling onto my skin like a sacrament. Above all, I hear you in music.
But these things aren’t quite you, you, golden, holy, ink-splattered, raw, birthed from some fallen dream and drowned into life by stardust, a sweet mirage before the dawn of death. My first taste of ambrosia and my last prayer.
In other words, I think I could love you.
I don’t know the first thing about love, that endless enigma. I’m young. I still have so much growth ahead of me. I’ve never even kissed anyone. But it isn’t something you know, is it? It’s a tide, a force, a way of being. It’s life itself. It’s why we’re here, as the universe experiencing itself, as its eyes and ears and senses and heartbeat. For love.
I feel it when I’m doing stupid things with my friends, when I’m crying in my mum’s arms, when I’m drinking tea with my grandma, when I’m listening to music with my brother, when I’m dancing in the kitchen with my dad. I feel it in the warm arms of nature. I feel it when I’m swept away into art.
I feel it now, writing this, in a new sort of way that has everything to do with you.
When I’m with you, or thinking about you, it feels like I’m coming apart at the seams, spilling open, all pink mush and slick red ribbons, but somehow that feels warm and fuzzy and lovely and like everything I’ve ever wanted and ever will. My heart rises slowly — unfurls, a blush, curled-edge bud, papery thin. And yet a tidal wave, swelling in devotion to the moon. A supernova, light cracking the perfect canopy, bursting in all the colours of death or life or strung somewhere in between for you.
Yearning. It’s my favourite word for a reason.
And is that not love? Is that not all it could be? Or is even all this an idealised dream, a belief birthed as little more than smoke from the burning heart of an eternally stubborn romantic? Am I simply caught in the friction between these spinning, prismatic, technicolour possibilities, and the raw, imperfect and fundamentally human reality where love really resides?
Probably. I’m just a girl with big feelings.
I’m trying to learn patience. I’m trying to learn how to move with the eternal water, with time, that fickle, impossible thing. I know that even this will pass, if only I learn to let go. Even the sun that folds into the moon will not last forever. Every blinking star will fracture, someday, every one, even ours. How could we ever outlast those things, if even they aren’t eternal?
But then how does your gaze linger for a moment and become eternity?
I don’t know. I’m just trying to love the questions.
Isla McCreath, 15, a part of our earth ✯
“I'm a teenage girl with big feelings who likes from time to time to write myself into nothingness, write until my fingers bleed onto the paper, write until I remember what it is to be alive. I spend my little slice of existence breathlessly breathing life, twirling in the spaces in between, all the while devoted to harnessing my chaos until it becomes art, and learning how to love. I like pomegranates, cherry ripple ice cream, the colour red, warm pastries, the smell of coffee shops, silver jewellery, cherry blossom, weeping willows, sun-drenched brooks, full moons, cotton sheets, dreaming, the tipping point between summer and autumn, and, of course, art in every form.”