Your fire, your flame

I’ve spent every night like rain on the floor,

A quiet storm behind a locked bedroom door.

My pillow a shoreline where saltwater stays,

While I drown in the echo of all of your days.

I cry for your hurt like a sky split in two,

Each thunderous heartbeat still breaking for you.

Yet you say I’m a winter that never shows care,

A frostbitten forest, 

emotionally bare.

But I was raised where love wore a careful disguise

In tight little smiles and in sidelong goodbyes.

Where arms learned restraint, 

where the language was small,

Just side hugs like shadows that brushed down the hall.

Affection was whispered like wind through a seam,

A flicker of warmth, 

not the fire you mean.

So my love is a lantern I’m learning to tend,

A flame in my hands I don’t yet comprehend.

You see sunlight that pours through the seams,

With love loud as rivers and bright as your dreams.

While mine was a language of silence and art

A map drawn in secret, 

inside of my heart.

So if I seem distant, 

like mountains of snow,

It’s not that I don’t feel the rivers below.

I’m learning your sunlight, 

your oceans, 

your part

This strange, 

shining grammar of loving by heart.