i’ve been warned to not want you. to think pragmatically about you. i’ve been told that i only expect you in my mind because you don’t exist. that if i keep trying to find you, i will only end up disappointed – chasing a shadow against a moving pavement.
i was warned because i wanted you. more passionately than a saxophonist breathing life into the piece between his lips. more wildly than his finger taps against its keys. more perfectly than his rhythm, his blues, that i feel reverberating from him.
yet despite how badly i wanted you – despite how much i was ready to sacrifice to work for you – with time, i believed the warnings.
with what i was told, it gave me comfort to know that i couldn’t get you because no one else could either. it’s not me, it’s you. the classic line that brings on heart ache to many, when reversed, only brings relief.
so i went about my days a little more content. my breaths became softer as i inhaled acceptance of the non-perfect creations i could make. my sleep slightly deeper as i evicted you from my mind and built in your space wants within reach.
but then, in a serendipitous twist, i stumbled upon you. i walked the streets of a city where you were everywhere. you existed in the perfect spheres of the creases in the pavement built around a monument that holds history beyond what it shares. you existed in the magnificence of the trees planted perfectly apart – far enough to let children and lovers run through the spaces between the trunks but close enough to let the top branches caress each other. you existed in the small specialty shops that lined the streets of the most unexpected areas – each with its own theme, its own perfect theme that held so true to the essence of the goods it sold inside. you existed in the savory and the sweet. in the creations for the stomach that defied the senses of the mouth.
you existed.
you did not exist in nature. i saw no sign of you in the clumsy river breaking through the bridges. no sign of you in the snow, fresh on the ground. you existed in creations of people. flawed people. people so passionate about what they were creating that they found you, embraced you, surrendered to the pursuit and discovery of your existence.
vous existiez.
