Strum your fingers across my skin like an electric guitar, making music from my sounds with your callused hands. Baby, bring me home to your bed before my body turns to dust in the wind from a longing I can’t hold together anymore. Bring me home to your scent of autumn and your touch of a warmth like a fall furnace. We’ll keep our doors locked so the breeze won’t shatter me, so we don’t get cold, and so you won’t ever leave. You’ll make music out of me until the sun falls to its knees, hitting the pillow with soft grace from my lullabies. I’ll quickly forget about sleep when I get lost in the fairytale forest of your green eyes that promise hope and a temporary salvation. I’ll forget about everything except the trees and the leaves and the grass you keep in your gaze. My bare body will go swimming in your pools of emeralds until the rest of the world is drowned out and you bathe me in sensations of false hope under your hungry hands. While the crickets chirp, you’ll teach me to play guitar off your skin, making music by hand and mouth. And then maybe we’ll sit by the ocean making symphonies there, until the waves sing with you. And then the hills until we bleed stardust. Until we melt into each other like liquid night, hands of soft darkness and moans of a midnight storm. Though I wish I could see your face in those golden headlights, watch how it brightens your smile lines and shines against your eyes until they’re flecked with gold. Wish I could make you sing as gilded light pours through the window’s cracks like honey, while morning birds sing in harmony. Then maybe you could make me a sweet breakfast so I won’t forget your candied lips, or bring me a coffee in bed to remind me of your heated breath laced with lust. Then we’ll sit on the porch while my limbs and heart melt beneath the sun’s loving pour, spilling into you with everything I have and more.
For now, I’ll wake and pick up our empty cups of liquor before the golden light leaks in and can’t conceal me any longer. I’ll kiss you goodbye, feeling your skin for the last time, trying to make music once more over the sounds of your snores. For a final moment, your autumn scent will fill my senses and then I’ll go. But just so I can finish our love story, look at me one more time before I’m forced to find the greens of your eyes in a foreign forest. Before I run from the city to pick every leaf that’s the same soft emerald, simply so I don’t forget them. Wish me goodnight just once more before the calming hum of your voice within the ocean’s current becomes all I have left. Leave me just one shirt of yours so I can remember your fall smell forever, so I don’t have to find it stolen by someone else.
Yet I know, the leaves will turn brown in winter and maybe I’ll fall for a love with eyes of book leather and dried leaves. Maybe that’s beautiful in another lifetime. Just maybe, maybe, I’d like to think in this lifetime that once I collect all the green leaves that scatter the earth, you’ll be mine. Maybe if I capture all 7 oceans’ symphonies in music boxes then you’ll wish me goodnight again.
But for now, I’ll try to write, to peel off all the words I had left to say to you. To peel off the glue where you stuck your silly little smile under the candlelight and your enchanting eyes that poured into me. But no matter what, you stick, and you stick. So I think our love may have been more than a craft clue to my organs. I think it may have patched me up better than bacon grease on a Saturday morning. Better than a bandaid on a bloody knee. More efficient than staples to a cracked soul. I think my love for you became a part of who I was, no longer a second skin, but only the first layer holding on for dear life, falling apart at the thought that you’ll never love me back. So please, just look at me once more, and wish me goodnight. And if you think you could love me too, let me stay until the golden light melts our hearts into one.
It’s possible that just one more kiss could save those leaves from death. And maybe even me.
