All or Ashes

There’s no middle ground with my heart

I daydream way too much for a guy.
Half the time, I’m writing letters in my head to a girl I’m madly in love with (mind you, I haven’t even met her yet) or making up scenarios that don’t exist.
It wouldn’t hurt to write one of these letters down, right?
I’m a hopeless romantic, yes I know.

This is it then. The first of what I hope are many letters.

---

I have stood beside strangers in crowded rooms, saying nothing, yet feeling understood.

I have watched the sun rise with no one to tell, and set with no one to hold, cold shivers running down my spine.

I have listened to tales of old, soaked in love and dripping with lust, each one a reminder of what I didn’t have.

I have replayed the same old song until it tore me open and stitched me in the same breath, and I couldn’t tell if I loved or hated it.

I have watched rain race down window panes, tracing patterns into shapeless maps.

I have written letters I never sent, folding them neatly into the quiet of a drawer.

I have sat on the edge of cliffs, feet dangling above the void, daring gravity to call my bluff.

I have made wishes to far stars, knowing silence was certain, yet I begged for the impossible.

And all of it, I would have thrown away for one minute in your company.

I did all this without you, my love, and I survived.

But survival is not living; it is only proof of what I have lost.

What is a lifetime, what is forever, if you were never in it?

I want to love you with every part of me, until you can’t tell where you end and I begin.

Without reason, without cause.

I want to love you until there’s nothing left of me to give.

I want to like you because, but love you despite.

I want to treat your smile and your frown the same, knowing they are both halves of the same whole.

I want to love you with nothing held back, not even the ugly parts.

I want to see you when you’re cruel, when you’re selfish, when you’re breaking.

I want to stay anyway.

Perfection bores me.

I crave the cracks, the sharp edges, the parts that could cut me if I hold on too long.

I’d rather have a storm I can drown in than calm seas I can’t feel, and if I’m going to sink, let it be with you pulling me under.

If loving you means losing myself, then I hope there’s nothing left of me by the end.

Because pieces scattered in your wake are worth more than a whole life without you.

When I am with you, I will have no past, only a future.

So if this life doesn’t have you in it, I want another one.

And if I can’t have another, then I want nothing at all.

Let it all burn.

— Yours, until there’s nothing left