Fran

Desire is shown through the hands and yearning is worn in the eyes. The mouth is only good for two things: kisses and lies. That’s why I call you a friend even as my eyes dip to your lips, as my hands cling to your hips.

You trip on curiosity before you fall in love. Sometimes you stumble into friendship or slip on desire. It’s an accident, really; love is what happens when someone steals all of your attention. A fall is inevitable when you don’t mind your step.

No flirting. I’ll just argue my point until you kiss me to shut me up.

Let’s try. Let’s give it a chance to fail before we deem it doomed. Let’s let it sting, let it break us. I would rather fall on a knife held by your hands than fall into the arms of anyone else.

I think I have missed you longer than I have known you and that I will love you longer than I will have you. The sky is my witness: the moon has listened to me wax poetic about us two; Saturn wears the ring I saved for you.

Happy new year. I hope it’s a fun one. I hope you run out of problems but never out of joy. I hope your cup is always full and your head is always light. I hope you wear out your heart by loving everything an unreasonable amount.

Some people are tiny suns and some are tiny moons and they spin and spin around each other in the sky. It may take a while for them to meet but when they do they make such a pretty sight. An eclipse can be a meeting of lips, a merging of souls; so different but so alike.

You’re mine: to care for, to look after, to spoil; to disagree with, to piss off, to annoy; to beg forgiveness from, to absolve, to meet halfway. You’re mine to learn, you’re mine to love.

The nose scrunch of affection is one of my favourite things. Sometimes your face can’t keep your heart’s secrets and it shows.

‘What if it this doesn’t work?’ You ask, lips halfway to mine. ‘What if it ends?’ But endings are inevitable in life and I can think of worse ones. I wouldn’t mind meeting mine with a kiss that feels like a knife with lips.

To want someone so badly it makes you silly, makes you say stupid things and act in strange ways. To want someone so badly it keeps you up at night, keeps your thoughts busy, your mind foggy. To want someone this badly; is it a fall or a tragedy?

I know you well, don’t I? It’s your blessing and my curse. I know you well enough to hear all the words you don’t say. To feel the touch you don’t allow your hands to claim. To stop myself from giving you the kiss you don’t know how to ask for.

[Unsent Text 7.12am] Meeting you was like getting back a part of myself I didn’t realise I was missing, and I just knew: It couldn’t have been anyone else after that. It couldn’t have been anyone else after you. [Sent Text. 9.13am] Wake up loser

If friends is all we’ll ever be, that’s fine by me. I have only ever wanted to give you my heart; you have only ever held it gently, and kept it safe. If friends is all we’ll ever be, that’s fine by me. But my heart is locked up tight, and you have the only key.

Love can be felt and given and taken but love can be worn, too, and it is often the most obvious sign. It’s in the necklace you give and the jacket you borrow and in the arm you keep around their waist like a belt, a subtle way to say: ‘mine.’

Realised I addressed my Christmas wish for love to Satan instead of Santa and maybe that’s why relationships feel like a hellish crusade.

I promise to always know you well enough to know exactly which of your buttons to push and which to keep securely fastened. Which to quickly undo and which to slowly unravel.

Some people go together like parentheses; matching opposites, always curled towards one another, keeping the best parts of their story safe between them.

‘What’s mine is yours’, I say, and I mean my clothes, my food, and my heart. You have left fingerprints on them all.

I think if they erased my memories I’d remember you anyway. You’re branded into my soul, scorched into my heart. When they cut me down for wood they’ll see your initials carved into my bark.

‘Did you see that?’ You ask. As if you weren’t my attention’s sweet center. As if I could look anywhere else. As if I would.

The way you say a name is the first clue: with affection, held between your lips like something sacred. Shortened with affection, spoken with the kind of familiarity that betrays a favourite habit.

Everyone has a soft spot: a weakness that makes them strong, something they would give up everything for. Sometimes it’s a person, the one who gets away with everything. The one who got away, who is everything.

Some people are so sweet they make your blood sugar spike and that’s why you feel a little lightheaded when you look their way, why you feel a sudden urge to take a bite. Coloquially called cuteness aggression.

We call them butterflies, the fluttery beat of wings you feel in your chest when you stumble on love. Maybe that’s why ribs are cages; to stop our hearts from taking flight.

The more I like you the less normal I am able to act. I was not built to love things by halves.

What a terrible case of long-distance love (you’re standing too far for me to reach with anything but my thoughts)

We draw lines and give them names like friendship, like business, like rivalry. But lines become circles when you make the two ends kiss.

The last full moon of the year is heavy with wishes made by all the restless sleepers who stayed up late asking for small miracles before the Earth completes its journey around the sun.

There’s a certain look of desire, of yearning. It weighs down the eyes and slows your blinking. It’s the same feeling that makes your hands do silly things like reach for what they can’t have. That forces your body to lean towards another person like a flower seeking sunlight.

My heart is a tangerine I have peeled and pulled apart to give segments away.

If people at work knew I was a full time yearner on the internet they wouldn’t ask me to “pay attention during this meeting” and other similarly unwhimsical things

There’s a kind of beauty that takes your breath away and it’s true what they say, that attention is the beginning of devotion. That love is not being able to look away.

You love me; I would die and kill for you. I love you; I go on living for it, for us two.

I like how love softens your voice and tugs at the corners of your eyes. I like how it paints your face sweet and makes your touch gentle. I like that fondness is hard to miss because it refuses to stay locked inside the cage of your ribs where you heart lives.

Love is the ribbon around my throat that squeezes every time you come near.

Because the heart is a muscle, it has memory. It remembers you; what you’ve shared and what I’ve learned from watching you all this time. And if to be loved is to be known, no one has loved you better than me.

I’m the jealous type. I don’t like that the sun gets to kiss your cheeks or that hundreds of dawns met you before me or that your lips have curled into smiles I will never get to see.

For Christmas I want a necklace (a string of kisses left like crumbs, a little reckless)

I’m good at dancing around the perimeter of all the things I can’t say. You’re good at smiling to hide the words that threaten to spill out when you look my way. But as our fingers graze in a barely there touch, the truth comes out anyway.

People carry love in different places: in their eyes as a lingering look, in their hands as a soft touch, on their lips as the name they call out most. Sometimes it’s buried deep down their sleeve and it’s impossible to see unless they unbutton themselves and show it to you.

‘You’re my favourite person,’ I say, and you can’t quite mask the surprise. ‘Is that so hard to believe?’ ‘A little.’ For a moment, my heart breaks. ‘Sometimes I say your name just because I miss you. I thought it was obvious.’

They say you should keep your enemies close so I’ll make one of you just so I can keep you closest of all. Within touching distance, close enough for our lips to brush.

When we met, one look was all it took. I knew I was in danger when you walked in and brought all the sunlight inside; I knew I was doomed when you walked out and took all the air with you.

‘You’re so weird,’ I say, and what I mean is: I am so hopelessly endeared by your every quirk, quality, and flaw.

What do you know of devotion? Of falling to your knees and pressing your face against someone’s stomach, and feeling gentle fingers run through your hair. Of knowing every story has an ending and this one could hurt you so badly but still loving them enough to let it happen.

I push my luck as I push your buttons but this is how it always goes: You roll your eyes and scoff, laugh and whine and complain, but I always end up getting my way.

An unstoppable force (the urge to flirt) vs an immovable object (annoying you instead)

Of all the ways the body gives the heart away, laughter is the most obvious. It’s a side effect of fondness and it never fails to make it known that the person you can’t stop smiling at has taken your heart on loan.

If I ever see heartbreak at the bottom of the cup of coffee you make me, I will drink it anyway. I’d rather choke on the broken pieces of my heart than go without having had you at all.