I wrote a thing...

Hello, lovelies.

I am taking a short break from studying madly and coughing up my lungs to post a short...thing. I don't know if it's a poem, a short story or an essay, but I do know that I wrote it (that is, unless someone has played a very clever joke on me and I only think that I wrote it). I wanted to post my first draft on this blog. Yes, it's still in draft format, so any input sent via comment or the communication widget on the right of your screen would be greatly appreciated, because it's still at that early stage of life where I can't tell if it's absolute rubbish or not.

~Maddie

Forever Almost

A thing, by Maddie.

If I loved you, I would love you in the complete and indisputably, unquestionably existent way that the wind blows through branches in October, creating fingers of air that, just for a fleeting instant, are solid enough to shake down dead leaves and toss them into a stormy sky, to turn and flip in one final celebration of a vitality already lost. I would love you in a way that just happens, so normal and so right that no one thinks about it, like the clockwork heartbeat of the universe. I would write you songs that could freeze snowflakes in the air and leave them there to hang, as specks of lace trapped in an immortal beam of cold afternoon light. I would sing down the moon and the stars and all the planets for you, and then launch them back into the sky to hover more brightly and more brilliantly than they ever could have before.

If I loved you, I never would have expected to. My love would be the lazy, slinky light that seeps in through the window at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and reminds me that even though the morning was full of life, the late, sluggish hours of the day will still slink in and claim my productivity as they trap sparkling dust in their glittering wakes. Though I forget this will ever happen, it does, as surely and as predictably and as beautifully as it can. You would have crept up on me, becoming an integral and irreplaceable part of my life before I even had the sense to stop and catch my breath.

I would tell you wonderful things, if I loved you. All those secrets that I have been saving for the one I love would be yours, by right of birth. I would tell you the word that means the smell of puddles, dirt and worms right before it has finished raining. I would show you all the ways that I hide my soul in plain sight. As we would lie down on our backs to look at the late September sky, I would talk about reds and yellows and blues, but mostly blues, because they are my favorites. And you would tell me things, too.

If, someday, you read this, then the future from this point, this fleeting and pregnant now will have laid itself out along the pebbled path of my imagination, to meander down streets held up by cafes and cobblestones and clouds and glass windows and the smell of books and the probable freckles on your nose. If you never read this, someone else will, someday. If you never read this, I wonder if you will know that you were my almost someone, and I yours. I wonder if one day, when your grandchildren are out of the house and you look up at the October sky, if you will remember our small, wind-tossed dance of possibility. And then the dead leaves will sink to the ground, and the memory will once again be claimed by the past.