Inspired by “Sorrow” by Kieran Halpan
Wrapped in an armor of strength and defense, I was when I met you when the moment it was supposed to be. I had hidden behind it, because I was convinced that I no longer needed it, the touch and the proximity. It would never happen again.
“Put the armor down,” you said, and it was more encouragement than an order, so I did not immediately deny it, but thought. If that was the case at all, I was not too much attached to my armor.
“Why?” I asked, nevertheless, because it is not so easy to be defenseless to face all the possibilities.
“Because I want to see you,” you explained, as I read your desire and your longing in your eyes to come to me.
“I forgot how it goes,” I had to admit, you and me. So you stood up and came up to me. One shutter around the other leaped through your eyes and your touch. The armor fell. Underneath I was defenseless and unprotected, but you embraced me with your affection, which transformed the distance into familiarity. At last I realized that you surrounded me with another protection, one that does not separate and yet strengthens one another.
“I want to see you,” you explained.
“But you see me already,” I replied, as I stood naked and bare in front of you.
“That’s not you, not yet,” you replied gently. And I did not know what you meant until you showed me that there is a nakedness, far beyond that of the body, of thoughts, of feelings, of being. You invited and tempted me. So I offered myself to you, with all that I was, thinking, acting, feeling, breathing. And you enveloped me with your thoughts, your feeling, your action, your breath in your acceptance. I felt I broke up because the parts inside me were forced into each other and did not fit. You put them in the right place. You have made me heal me by dividing me.
And as you gave me your gaze, you loosen it again. You went because the moment was over. I did not understand what was going on with us. We, there was no longer. At the beginning you and I, it was now again. Just that I could not find the armor I needed, since you had taken my security. With you. And the arm around me, in which I felt safed. What should I do with myself after I learned that I could still open and give myself, since you were no longer there? What could I do with all the possibilities you opened to me, which I thought I could only live with you?
It was not until the mist of the pain had evaporated that I looked again at the picture that had come about because you dissolved me and reassembled me. There were not only parts of me, but also of you, because you answered my exposition with yours, because you showed me openly, naked and bare, in a nudity that goes far beyond that of the body. You had introduced yourself to me, given me, irrevocably.
I have a new armor, one of warmth, security, and confidence that you cloak around me when I doffed my old. With you, you have expanded me and re-opened to me all the possibility of experiencing. You made me new because you were mine. And are. Because we took the moment that brought us back life. The gift you have been to me remains as a part that made me heal. At that moment.
Inspired by “Sorrow” by Kieran Halpan
