Sweet Surrender

We could speak of the lightning and the thunder, the surge of you under me, the plunder, the plough, the release, but today I think only of you as softness. Yes, we are electric, or so people have said, but they will not understand this milder hum that arrives upon me in the same way the smell of honeysuckle tickles your nose in spring, or the way dust specks dance in a spill of sunlight. I think such softness always existed between us. That first time we met, it extended like a filament stretched finely between your eyes and mine, so fine in fact, that I could have mistaken it for coincidence. We stood in a room loud enough to excuse looking anywhere else, yet every time I looked away I found the thread had quietly reeled my gaze back towards your shimmering pools of blue. Invisible strings, humming under the skin of the evening, tuning us to the same impossible key. Then that moment I asked you to dance and I felt the world dissolving. Glasses lifted, laughter broke against walls, songs arrived and left like waves leave the shore, but your hands possessed a confidence that said "don't go anywhere, stay here with me" and I stayed and stayed and stayed, because how couldn't I? We moved badly and beautifully, like two people translating a language neither had learned yet somehow both recalled.

There is a tenderness that announces itself with soft voices and careful hands, but ours arrived laughing - deep volcanic laughter straight from the belly, welling and swelling with the plumpness of a cherub. It arrived in your ridiculous grin when you caught my eyes, in the way you seemed surprised each time I made you laugh as though delight was something that happened only to other people. Let me delight you, sweet girl, let me meet your self with kindness.

I think I knew then - not that I loved you, for love is too grand a word for beginnings. I knew only that the evening had acquired a centre that would hold us together like the seed holds two halves of a peach. And I knew then, that every room would be measured against the terrifying geometry of that dance: your eyes finding mine across a crowd; the invisbible strings pulled taught between us, the strange gentleness of being recognised and seen before a single promise had been spoken.

Some people remember first kisses, and oh boy I remember ours, but I also remember that moment before, where the music played and the room retained its artfulness, whilst the distance between us learned it no longer wished to exist.