Unrequited oceans

Love is a compulsion for collision. An unavoidable drive to meet, to crash into an other. To press lives and mouths and yearnings together until it cracks us open. Because sometimes it's the only way to get it out, to cope with the swell of the oceans inside us.

This is love, for me, perhaps just for today. (Mixed metaphors because one will never do for this). I won't always think so. It's not all I think. But I am cracked open and I'm afraid it's for the wrong person, again. I made the choice. I just need to understand it.

Tonight I was driving in the rain and my face started to match my windscreen: streaked with rivulets of wet. I drove until there was somewhere quiet to stop and then I curled against the steering wheel and heaved with the ocean in me.

I grieve not for a loss, but for the love I've never had. For needing these minor collisions to recognise the vastness of myself. For having to be cracked open before I realise that it is unrequited. That the swell coming back the other way is not from a meeting with another ocean but my own waves bouncing off a wall.