Like holding perfection

I've had to do a thousand hard things in my life. By far, the hardest has been letting you go. Something ancient and new and lovely and perfect in me found something ancient and new and lovely and perfect in you. Letting you go meant leaving those things behind because they got lost in you somewhere, and I couldn't go back to find them. So today, walking away, I'm far less new, far less lovely, and so far from perfect. Tomorrow will surely find me the same.

Trying to trace the steps of our last dance, our last time together, and our last conversations yields no clues. I'll never know what happened. All I know is I got so desperate and so scared because you knew what you knew and then I was no longer in the know. I was on the outside looking in like I've always been. While I spent time with you, looked as deeply as I could into your eyes, and almost made my home in you, I still didn't know you. I saw a sliver of your beauty, and I was awestruck. Then you were gone again, and silent, like the words we said were never said and the love we shared was only a vapor. 

I'll always love you. I think I always have. My dumb mouth had to learn the words to describe a woman like you, I think, before I could show you yourself, before you could see how much I love you. How can I describe the wonders of the world around me without a vocabulary full of adjectives and superlatives? In the same way, I had to learn the words to describe you. My words drip with love, with care, with trembling, and with power. I know you've felt me. If I could have, I would have made love to you with words. Sadly, words were all I had. And words were not enough for a woman like you.

All those hard things I've done have made me a flinty rock — dead, and coarse, and mean. Strangely, I am none of those things with you. You became my conduit to newness, to light, to freedom, to grace, peace, and, most importantly, love. You filled me up, little girl, with the best emotions. I cannot thank you enough. Even though you're gone, I still feel the remnant of that glow we shared, like a campfire that turned to embers in my heart. 

Holding you was like holding perfection. I have no other words to describe it. You felt perfect in my arms. The way you fit into me was like you were made for me, like I was made for you. While our love has blown over like a squall, I'm still looking for the things the storm took with it, like you. I will always search for you in a crowd of faces. I will always see you in the saddest, sappiest love stories, in songs about girls who got away, in the faces of old ladies when I imagine what growing old with you would look like. 

I spill these words with every step I take because they flow out of me endlessly when I think of you. For the rest of my life, I will write these words, exhale them, breathe them out, and then pause, reload, and breathe them out again. I will be a walking, talking, living, breathing, unending love letter to you, written imperfectly but dutifully every single day.