If I Had It My Way

It is true: months come and go. But if I had it my way, I will not let this season end without tasting summer from your lips. I might restrain the setting sun so that its orange light can wax itself on your skin for the last time, like a sunset in pause held hostage by this insatiable yearning, its redemption possible only by way of a kiss — a ransom best paid in French. Though sunlight will color you, it is my fingers that will brush the gradients of light onto the canvass that is your body. Your shoulders, awash in that blissful radiance of sepia, shall be the playground where I will skate my fingers, cruising those lovely bones that frame something so immaculate you must be divine. Your back shall be the sky where my restless palms will glide until they have safely landed on your hands. I will kiss you. And then I will have to kiss you again just to be sure that you are, without doubt, the fire that will burn the last day of my summer.

Like fire is to cold nights, you are the water to my thirsty soul. Your toes shall be the shore where my own would run aground, like fallen petals thrown into the caress of the evening tide. This intimate touch is the closest I can get to all the coasts your heels have conquered, so if I had it my way, I’d pour myself into your memories. By then, you will remember that on those countless occasions when there were no whispers to lull you to sleep except the sound of waves negotiating the bay, someone equally lonely had his dreams set on you. In those midnight tussles with nostalgia, we will move like the wind, traceless but able to scale the heights and breach the limits of the horizon. You will be the east and west of my monsoons, and I the north and south of your skies. Wherever we may have to find our way, we will be the only directions we will ever need.

If I had it my way, I’d sink with you under the bed sheets, swim for the pillows, and dive back to our dreams where the ocean is a drop of the universe we build in our sleep. I’d try to bruise your neck with the tip of my tongue. But knowing that it might take forever, I’d stretch the night sky and wrap it around the world so that we will no longer have any need for sunrise and sunset to tell us what time it is. We will have the rest of our lifetime to ourselves. They say some people fall in love with those who do not even deserve the heart they have. But if I had it my way, if only I had, I’d engraft my heart to your chest in case you lose yours somewhere along the way. Wherever your feet might take you, you will have me.

I say these things with the best of intentions, for my fear is that if summer won’t cast my desires aflame, nothing else will. The rest of the year might become as cold as a heart so broken it feels nothing, not the gentle heat of early sunshine, certainly not the staccato of rain against this naked flesh I pray you would embrace for the warmth it could shelter you with, perhaps against all the lonely nights that you and I must bear as strangers who are yet to deliver themselves from solitude. In time, our lives will find grace from the benediction of sunlight as we lay together, your hand on my hand, our lips the only source of the sweet taste of summer. But until that day, you and I must continue looking for each other, relentless in our search for the better half of our lives if only to prove once and for all that we shall no longer be alone.

I am alone, and today I thought of you.