Poem
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so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
SONNET XVII
Pablo Neruda
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He meets Maeve in the fall and that's fitting because he's always considered autumn to be the bringer of his favourite things. Leaves that crunch underfoot and the brisk hope of Halloween on the horizon, a time to be anyone and anything else imaginable. He's always had a tremendous imagination for the fantastic, the whimsical, the unimaginable. Maeve is unimaginable. He falls in love with her piece by piece, line by line, part by part; a hopeless romantic too neurotically analytical to find the words to express how irrational she makes him. If he was capable of turning their life together into a sonnet, he would; instead, he's left just wordlessly wishing she could see his heart.
Despite this, he can list all of those pieces, lines, parts, and knows there's a kind of poetry in that.
First, her mind; she's a TA for a professor in the same field as the one he's working for and they begin exchanging emails after a cursory communication between them slips from professionally succinct to mutually curious. This lasts three months and he saves every sentence she sends him. Therefore, at first, he realizes that his is not a visual love. Remarkable, perhaps, that the man who has never loved another with any vivacity finds himself falling in love with size twelve Times New Roman on a typeset email. But she's there, in every line and dash, right down to the smallest morpheme in a string of her carefully worded letters. He wonders what she looks like. He wonders what colour her eyes, her hair, if she blushes or bites at her lip. He burns with the wondering of it.
He meets her in the rain: second is her laugh when the wind yanks his politely offered umbrella inside-out and then out of his hands to bounce helplessly down the street as they chase it; third is the curve of that smile around her eyes and mouth when she looks up at him and says, "Never mind, I quite like the rain." It's cold and damp but he's not entirely sure he minds either, not now.
Fourth is their first date; it will forever be etched in his memory with indelible ink, a dark, secret kind of memory that is treasured and private just as much as it is public and flaunted. He loves it as he loves the darkest parts of himself; he loves this memory as he loves the way it becomes a part of his soul, a part of him so openly and personally permanent as his shadow is on the floor beneath his feet—always a part of him so long as there are lights to cast it, no matter how slight.
Fifth; her hands. They're the first part of her he sees and, while he doesn't have time in the moment, later he recalls this and makes sure to memorise them in minute detail for all their intricate parts. They're small and light and nimble, the movements almost hidden to his eye unless he's looking out for them. Shy and involved; he wants to hold her hand. It takes him seven dates to finally express this desire and he can't find the words to say it correctly. Later, he'll learn how nimble and true her hands really are; at this moment, he is only struck by how obscenely childlike they are when she slips her fingers around his and clings despite his clammy over-eagerness. He holds her hands on the seventh date and pretends he's not basking in her secreted light, the darkest part of himself somehow both more and less in the way she brings what's hidden to the forefront.
He loves her without question, without compunction. Sometimes, he thinks she feels the same. It's a simple love built anew where nothing of the kind has ever lingered before and he knows he's helplessly sentimental about it. Seven dates turns to twelve and he puts aside his pride and tells her this. She asks him how he knows. He responds, "How could I not?" It's a silly feeling, saying this.
She kisses him by accident. Reaching up to kiss his cheek, he startles and turns his mouth to hers.
He invites her to more. It takes them seven months and a whirlwind of barely withheld anxieties to reach this point. The sixth thing he'd learned to love about her is her love for the stars, for all of the stars, even those that don't quite shine through the dusky pollution over of their DC home.
He buys a car with a wide back window and enough room to lay curled in the back together with the seat reclined. They drive for hours, through the summer and the storm, until he finds a field with endless opportunities. They drive in silence, except for when it's loud: the bump of her foot on the dashboard as she dances to the uneven beat of the broken stereo; the hiss of his hands across the hardened plastic steering wheel; the never-ending whisper of wheels on unbroken tarmac. They drive until the day is gone, lost together on an adventure to find the stars he knows shine brighter. The eleventh thing he loves: laying with her silently in a place they've never known.
And they find each other. Hand in hand at first; hands finding skin finding secret places within each other and upon each other that make the other gasp. The blankets are tangled. The windows fog with everything they're murmuring to each other. This is nothing he's ever had before. This is everything she's wanted to express. He lets her lead him. He follows that lead. It's nothing perfect.
For a time, he exists solely within the beat of his favourite things. Midnight, twelve o'clock, he finds the twelfth thing he'd write about her if he knew how to find the words. It's the feel of her around him as she pulls their bodies together and her careful like this becomes a frantic rendition of every possible way to say his name. He's never quite loved it as much as he does now. They're tangled, knotted, lost together; he's worried that they'll never again remember how to live apart. It's too fast and not quite fast enough all at once and, when it's over, he's worried it wasn't anything like what she'd hoped. She reassures him it is. They wipe the fog away and watch the stars blink.
Thirteen is falling asleep in her arms. He expects fourteen will be waking up once more within reach of them. If there's a fifteen in his clumsy sonnet, he knows it will be the rest of their lives.
Fourteen paragraphs to express the ineffable; he gives up trying and just exists within her heartbeat, bound together hand in hand and heart by heart as, outside their consecrated existence, night falls.