Love Letter

the cobra loves its prey

You don’t know me but I know you. Or, well— that’s not quite right.

I know pieces of you. I’ve heard stories. Fragments. They’ve become a mosaic: a stop motion picture where the gaps blur, my imagination filling in the spaces in between.

You have become the divine feminine incarnate. The materialized form of my anima— wild, chaotic creation, bound into embodied form.

Power.
True power over the hearts of men and gods—

Desire.
Desire itself made physical; want and lust and need and—

Value.
The one at the top of the mountain. The one I climb for. The one I must protect: the flower at the epicenter of the walled garden I toil to build.

Need.
I can feel it overtaking me now. I need you more than food to eat; water to drink; air to breathe. A force that could drive me to strangle a lion to death, or whimper in ecstatic bewildered submission.


I wonder if you would find all this unsettling.

I probably would.

I laugh at myself sometimes, standing in the kitchen at 2 a.m. with the fridge light on my face, whispering your name like a prayer I’m embarrassed to believe in.


I yearn for you like the tide yearns for the shore. It is relentless, recursive, never-ending and ever-blossoming.
I can’t let myself fall too far into the rhythm or my soul will never see the light of day again.


I am hopelessly in love with you and yet we do not speak. I cannot even picture what your face looks like.

Isn’t this ridiculous?


But I’ve heard your laugh in my dreams.

Others have told me stories about you that make me certain I am yours, and you are mine. I have seen you in others— pale imitations of what full incarnation embodies.


I love you the way the moon loves the sun— I am nothing without you. Your radiance empowers all my brilliance. Your being empowers my becoming.

I love you the way the cobra loves its prey. A fierce longing to sink my teeth into skin; to consume you so I can be whole; to become one with you so we can create new worlds of possibility.


I wonder whether you prefer tea or coffee.
I wonder whether your socks match.
I wonder what you do when you can’t sleep.

Maybe you snore.
Maybe you leave dishes in the sink.
Maybe you have some terrible opinion about music.

I hope so.


You are mine. I would poison the drinks; slit the throats; crack the skulls of 4.17 billion men to keep you mine. I would bend space and time and reality itself to find you. I would raze civilizations and destroy galaxies, all in your name.

I am yours. All yours. Every bone, every muscle, every fiber. Every wrinkle in my brain. Every last whisper,
every last shudder,
every last goosebump—

they all belong to you.


I want to kill for you.

I want to whimper for you.

I want to bend the world into a shape that looks like ours.

I want to fall so far into each other that we could not stand to bear even the thought of a universe without each other in it.


I want to ravish you. I want to own you, and I want to be owned. I want to know that you are mine just as much as I am yours. Submission and domination collapsing into unity, masculine and feminine warping into God, fractals straining themselves into symmetry—

I want you.

I need you.

I love you.


Love,

the tide and the shore
the cobra and the prey
the moon starving for your sun