Swimming

He picks me up just like that, and we lock onto each other effortlessly. It has never been this easy. I have never felt so secure. We both smile at the simple beauty of this act. He holds me like this. Our faces draw back to regard each other, and we talk, my legs wrapped snug around him, balanced on each other's hips. Balanced. That's the feeling, as I look into his young old eyes.

The other night I saw his eyes twenty, thirty years from now, saw this span of time flash through, but I still don't know what it means. I've learned to doubt myself, even when confronted with such a specific feeling. The force of projection is strong, but it doesn't mean it's accurate.

Emotional risk-taking. I go there. When it comes to matters of the heart, I'm no pragmatist. Looking into the future, I can see many paths. Looking into the past, I sympathetically view the crooked, winding, searching road that my soul has carried me along. It comes down to your soul. It comes down to the connections your soul needs, the food your soul feeds and thrives upon.

And so, it's not so simple. Because the soul is not simple. It demands so much the closer you get to it. To expand and not contract. To open and not close. To accept that the only way to invite love is to invite the possibility of pain. Love and pain, those organic, messy things. I refuse to become one of those sad, hard people that spend most of their time building fences, defenses, constructing very-good-reasons for living as they do, with doors closed and actions controlled.

There are options somewhere between swimming naked with the sharks and being locked in a cage. I need to believe there are.