There is a fire that warms without eating what it warms, that needs nothing destroyed to give its heat. Not the wildfire they write the songs about, the song where two people burn against each other until one of them is ash.
Ours is the other kind. The kind that glows.
Some loves are struck like flint,
spark thrown off the friction of opposites,
hot because they cannot hold still in the same room.
That was never us.
We were never two halves straining toward a seam. We were two people who had each, alone, in our own long dark, learned the hardest thing there is to learn, how to be at home in our own skin.
That is what I recognized in you.
Not that you finished me.
That you had already come home to yourself,
the way I had come home to myself,
so being near you was never a reaching.
It was a returning.
You stand out in the open where the world can see you,
and people name you either wonder or danger,
and you do not flinch from being seen.
I go quiet, I keep to the edges, to stay who I am.
Two ways of loving the same self.
Two doors into the same house.
And you carry,
you don't even try to,
a wide and undefended love,
the kind that asks nothing of what it loves.
I feel it on you the way you feel the weather.
So when I am pulled toward you,
it is not a stranger's pull.
It is the thing we already are,
turned all the way up, the being-at-home,
made loud enough to ache.
We come and we go.
We are two threads that cross and part and cross again,
never braided into one line,
never needing to be.
The spaces between us are not the failure of it.
They are how a thing like this keeps breathing.
I open my hand
and you arrive on your own,
which is the only way you were ever going to,
which is the only way I would want.
Let the others have their burning.
Give me the fire that does not consume.
Give me the cold flame,
the warmth with no wreckage in it,
you,
come home to yourself,
beside me,
come home to me.
Give me the cold flame.
I love me. I love you.
