We Flutter-bys

I want to be at home with you in this skin of ours, the mutual cocoon that forms between lovers. We are wrapped in silk and grace. I want to nestle the valley between my chin and mouth deep into your collarbone, my lips resting in that gorge between bone and muscle. I want to trace the moles and scars and creases of skin with a fingertip that knows the way. I want the nest of our tangled hair to be the home to fluttering thoughts and chirping dreams.

I want it to all be OK.

But our cocoon has holes we’ve yet to mend. And I can’t see the tiny tears behind your back. You capture me with your eyes and even with needle and thread (words, glances, truth) in hand I am unable to reach, unable to pull the fabric tightly between my hands and plunge the needle through this living breathing warp. You know that when I do that, the scar is still there. The seams will never fully merge, heal, replace cells with new like skin. There will always be a weakness there. 
And in my desperate pulling to mend and forget I will distort, rip, destroy other parts of our otherwise totally perfectly imperfect cocoon. We knew this when we started weaving it under the stars, hands and feet into the dirt, talking over riveted roads. We knew then that the chances of survival for such a being as this WE was slim but that trying anyway was as noble and necessary as birth and death. 

The veil is thinning and I am left with myself. I want to trace stories of us on your sternum, near the heart I love. I want to breathe in your spent breath and pick out the molecules you have used so well, full of memories of your lungs and all the other breaths you have breathed, every moment you have spent filling yourself with joy and grief, ecstatic wonder and deafening pain. 

There is time for this all. 

Allow us to be, to break through silk and grace and emerge as long winged flutter-bys, huge hearts swollen with hope and new beginnings we have woven together.