SWeetneSs

I didn't know you could pick locks.

Then again, that isn't a topic that usually comes up when two people first meet.

Growing up in a household with no real example of love, I was left to my own devices.

I had no choice but to get creative.

Ever since I could conceptualize what love should be, I spawned in myself a bluebird hatchling.

I placed him softly in a cage in my heart and raised him in secret and in confined darkness, nurturing him with little tablets of wisdom that I gleaned along the way.

He would sometimes keep me up at night and we'd bond as I taught him how to fly in restrained melancholy.

His cage door offered just enough gaps for me hear his whimpers.

I would gently remind him, "One day, she will set you free."

It was always you.

I dreamt of you countless times before I met you.

I'd wake up from intensely vivid hallucinations and would desperately attempt to fall back asleep to continue the slow, blissful jaunt I would take with you in my mind.

It's a twisted, masochistic relationship that I have with myself because I was painfully aware once I woke the feeling of being gutted would be inevitable.

Yet, I overzealously indulged.

And I would wake up with my insides on the floor.

Then you finally came along.

The unmistakable you.

It was love brought to life.

I've been screwed ever since.

With footsteps that would later become my favorite sound, you stepped out of your black sport-edition car wearing a tight, form-fitting tee that exposed your new, olive branch shoulder tattoos.

Never in my life had I been more excited to hug a person.

"Be careful" you proclaimed, as I rushed to drown in you, to remind me that your tattoos were still fresh, but I think there was a deeper meaning.

"Be careful. Loving me is not for the faint-hearted."

I saw you. And not just the physically appealing components of you that lightning-bolted my untamable dominant side.

I saw the real you.

I saw the girl who confidently hid her nerves and projected a ray of positivity that masked the past experiences that plagued her most vital organ.

I knew you were special from the get-go.

I could write a novel from what I see in your eyes.

You're so fragile, yet so strong.

You're the piece of china that stays intact while the bull destroys the rest of the shop.

It's easy to grip you tightly, but it's more important to hold you tenderly.

Your intuitive nature and your innate "march-to-the-beat-of-your-own-drum" demeanor can effortlessly intimidate others.

But what intimidates others entrances me.

The beat of your drum is my metronome.

To experience you fully, while thoroughly appreciating your gifts, is to be able to withstand the cuts, bumps, scrapes, and impact of collision after collision, and claw my way to the top of scrapheap of people who foolishly dared to change you.

You are a perfectly imperfect person.

You could never be replicated.

You are the calm, unchartered waters that tranquilly rest behind the most tumultuous of storms and I am a man determined to explore every inch of your sea.

In your arms, the locked opened.

You must have had one bizarre-looking makeshift key because my lock had grooves so deep and edges so jagged that only one key could have possibly fit.

There's no master key.

In a rage of an overdue geyser, my bluebird burst out of his cage and flapped his wings furiously and freely. Too freely.

When I think of it, was there even a lock?

I can remember no resistance to you.

Your southern Pennsylvanian voice was my bird call.

It consumed me in a euphoric fury of implacable sweetness.

Like a moth to a flame, he flocked to your light.

Southern Pennsylvania. That must be where you learned to eat ice cream so gracefully.

We both know that you still hold that sweet innocence inside of you that the tests of life have attempted to steal from you.

You sat on that bench, so composed, not even a drop crossed the rim of the cone.

Meanwhile, I sat there, ice cream melted all over my larger-than-average hands staining them orange.

Was I too busy looking into you or did the tidal wave of your voice daze my mind to forget that ice cream is meant to be eaten instead of held?

All I recall is that it melted so quickly mirroring the very way I melted for you.

With a gesture sweeter than the ice cream, you used your napkin to clean me up.

My hands were clean. At least, I thought they were.

But over a year later, my hands are still orange.

Baby, I need your napkin.

I'm still melting.