The Cure for Anything

First off, I want to marry Tyler Knott Gregson.  Oh, the things that man writes!  But I’m sure he’s married.  Or a homosexual.  Or a unicorn.  (I’ll explain the unicorn part in a later post.)  Most likely, he’s a married homosexual unicorn, because that’s pretty much these way things work.  😉

Yes, I know this is long.  Read it anyhow.  You will be glad you did.  And then, perhaps you’ll read it again.  I have.  Each time finding something new.   Honestly, he had me at pancakes.  I love me some good pancakes.  From scratch.  None of that box mix stuff for me.  Don’t tell me that men don’t know how to make pancakes.  My dad makes some of the best in the world.  Yes, I know how to make them too, but that isn’t the point.  Surprise pancakes, pancakes that someone else makes for you, they taste better.

There’s so much good here, I’m not going to go through and point it all out.  Read it for yourself and see what speaks to your soul.

 

I want this. I want that. I want photos of us. I want to be proud of us out loud. I want to kiss you.

I want to smile and laugh. I want to make you giggle and I want to make you sigh and I want to take your breath away and I want to dance with you at people’s weddings and I want to pick you up and carry you when your feet are tired and I want to wait until you are almost asleep and then kiss your nose and make you laugh so hard with some secret joke that your belly hurts and you smack me for waking you all the way up so we have to get out of bed and sit and watch the city lights while eating a bowl of cereal at 1:38 am.

I want to smell you fresh from a shower and paint your toenails and take you to baseball games and teach you hidden things that are going on that most people don’t know.

I want us.

I want the smell of pancakes when it’s me that cooks them and the sun hasn’t yet woken. I want the smell of dinner when it’s us that burned it because we fell to the floor and made love instead. I want the handprints on car windows, steamed up from the inside.

I want long baths followed by short showers and the scent of your shampoo staining my hands for the entire day to follow.

I want ears that hear the words I spill instead of eyes that read them.

I want notebooks black with ink from all the details I noticed from all the times I sat and marveled at the way you spin through an hour.

I want fireworks from mountaintops and lightning from windowsills. I want lazy board games where rules forget to matter and I want shouting matches over important things.

I want a passion that burns through us and sets the sheets on fire. I want to wake up covered in soot from the night before.

I want a hand to catch my head when my eyes fill up with water, and I want fingers to find my shoulders when the weight of a lifetime feels too heavy from time to time. I want to be the tireless palms that rub the aches from your flesh and the kiss on the forehead after you fall asleep from it.

I want the steering wheel cold in my hands on the start of a morning road trip far from here and I want to be the sound of your legs stretching when we stop for gas. I want the photos of every sign at the border of every state and I want my fingers slightly stained with the stamps from every visa in our passports. I want the odor of strange food that snakes its way down long streets and the sound of boots on cobblestone and clay.

I want rainfall and I want your hair soaked in it. I want green grass and light pouring in through tree branches and slow steady steps towards me.

I want the sound of nothing when it’s shared with you, I want to gasp as nothing always becomes something when your hand is in my hand and the night unfolds.

I want movies that play as we don’t bother watching them and I want kisses in the back of the theater when we forget people can see. I want popcorn spills and candy hands and the stillness we swear lives around us.

I want the noise rustling grocery bags make when you try to squeeze them to all be carried in one trip and I want the fullness of pantry shelves and I want the standing with hands on hips and long stares into them to unearth the secret of what dinner will consist of.

I want the slow motion fall of hair that was cut and I want the chuckling laughter when you cut a spot too short. I want to watch the broom sweep back and forth and forth and back and I want to hold the dustpan to catch the cast aside pieces of me you no longer thought I needed.

I want your feet in my hands and my thumbs sore from pressing out the hours you spent on them. I want laughter that comes on so suddenly that everyone around us thinks our tears are of sorrow and our breath abandoned us like we were sinking ships and the sea was filled with lifeboats.

I want to be the mirror that watches you disapprove of yourself and I want to be the voice that comes in at the perfect moment to say how beautiful the exact spot you didn’t know I knew you were staring at is.

I want to be your fanciest shoes and I want to be the way they actually hurt so you cannot wait to take them off. I want to be the sound of fingernails being clipped in bathroom walls when the clock is rounding 12 and searching for single digits again. I want to be secretly annoyed you never clean them up.

I want lazy Sundays and busy Saturdays and the freedom Friday brings and the apprehension of a Thursday at 2:45 pm and the quiet moments reading on a Wednesday when it snows and a Tuesday where we rent the best new movies and a Monday filled with lethargy. I want the weeks and the months of you but I want the hours and the seconds more. I want the tiny ticks between a second and I want whatever lives between those.

I want to be all the fairy tales we tell all the kids we ever meet and the way we are actually talking about ourselves.

I want the Christmas lights and the glow in your eyes and the sound of paper crinkling and the little bits of glitter dust left after tying all the bows.

I want the dancing. All the dancing in all the places to all the songs and the shuffling of two sets of feet that have waited a lifetime to orbit each other. I want the road and the sky and the plane and the car and the exhaustion and the elation and the sea and the mountains high.

I want the fever you chill and the cold you soothe and the drive to the hospital when the room must be of an emergency variety. I want the humming and I want the soft lullaby of your sleeping next to me.

I want to be the one to remind you of the strength you’ve always been made of and I want to be the one to hold you when adrenaline is all that remains when that strength runs out. I want to be the reminder that you don’t ever need a reminder that you are made of wild things and they frolic inside you without a single thought to who may be watching or what thoughts might be filling their heads. I want to be the eyes that widen on your face as you realize your worth. I want to be the roots of you and the soil they love the taste of.

I want to be the starless night and the moon filled reflections on the surface of the waters. I want to be a long story told with fantastical details and miraculous characters and far off exotic locations and wild adventure.

I want to be a single sentence, simple and perfect that feels like a kick to the guts of us. One sentence with few words that sums up more than ten thousand pages bound tight with leather and glue.

I want the planets to align and it to mean something special and I want to watch as stars fall for us and only us and I want to count meteors until I realize you fell asleep and I’ve been counting all this time alone.

I want to be the sun and have you warm your face to me, and I want to be the moon and guide you home. I want to be the galaxies that fill the parts we thought black and I want to be the light that took so long to reach from there to here.

I want the universe to de-evolve and I want us to shrink back to cave people and from there back to apes and from apes back to crawling creatures and from their awkward shuffling back to the legless swimmers and from there back to spineless jellyfish and on further until we were two organisms with two cells and finally back to where we were one thing, one cell, then one atom spinning in the blackness, waiting for the explosion that would start our story.

FIN