In The Event This Doesn't Fall Apart

by Shannon Lee Barry

You have this way of looking at me that stops my heart; it is the way, I think, I’ve always dreamed of being looked at. Like I hurt your eyes a little. Like you can’t believe your luck to be standing in front of me.

“Please stop that,” I say, and it is the first and only time I lie to you. Please don’t ever stop. I want to be looked at by you until the sun goes down.

float around the party feeling happy as ever, and when I get to feeling lost I look for you. You are almost always staring. I like how it feels, the person I’m looking for looking back.

And we laugh and it’s easy and sometimes it’s too easy and something outside of us comes along to make it hard. And then, even then, with us sitting sad and broken it is easy. It is easy to go through something hard with you. I think that could be the beginnings of something like love.

Everything or almost everything. That’s you and me.

You were in my orbit long before I felt the pull to you, a friendly landing blinking in the dark. And I was in your orbit long before you thought to look for me, a shadow giving way to tiny spark.

And I am a person whole, long before you. I am a person whole without you. But I think the tiniest part of me will be suspended, waiting. There is the tiniest corner of life that won’t feel right until you’re back again.

But when I met you I realized there was no settling. There is a person who has everything I’ve ever wanted— all at once the funniest, kindest, most trustworthy person I’ve ever known. To get along with someone so well, to want to hear your opinions on everything and want to tell you everything the second it happens, to think about you every morning and look through pictures and feel my heart ache... and to have it all returned?

Even now, I can still catch glimpses of you, before you were you to me. Back when love songs were just love songs, before every one became about you. There is a simplicity to it. And a terrible, deep, complexity. There is invariably more to lose. But there we sat, in front of everything we had to gain.

When it came to loving you, it was fact. There was never a decision at all.

There’s a little wisp of hair on the back of your head and I could cry just thinking about it.

Sometimes I think I spent so long hoping for someone like you that I willed you into my life.

Maybe love is just wanting to be known.

And when a thought occurs to me, a thought that might have come and passed without any great circumstance, I am overcome by the need to tell you. Does he know I wanted to be an explorer? That I grew up with a big painting of a glacier on my wall, that I used to take water samples and dream of science more than art? Does he know what made that change?

I discover myself the more I’m with you. And I think I fell in love with me, too. You lit the path and I simply followed. You took my hand and led me through a gallery: Things That Are Amazing About Me. I learned myself the way I would a stranger. You showed me things I had always possessed but overlooked.

I swore you were a lonely thought. By luck you were fruition.

Sometimes I like to spend some time in your mind. Everyone has super powers there, and it’s always Saturday, and no problem can’t be solved without a little hope. And sometimes while I’m there I’ll sit down with your idea of me. She looks like me but prettier, her features more defined. Kinder and more soft and always forgivable. She is me but in my best light, the way you always see me.

And you and my idea of you— well they might just be the same guy. I’ve never seen them in the same room at the same time, at least. You’ve never proved me otherwise.

Take the chance to change your life. Take the chance for no other reason than because it’s come around.