I Fall Into You Every Time

Every time I see you, I fall in love with you again.

Not gently.

Not beautifully.

I fall the way stars collapse – violently, completely, with enough force to destroy everything they once were.

It does not matter how many times I have seen your face. It does not matter how familiar your voice has become, how well I know the shape of your hands or the particular way your eyes change when your thoughts drift somewhere far away. Familiarity should have made you ordinary by now. It should have softened the impact of you.

Instead, you become more dangerous each time.

Every time you enter a room, something inside me loses its balance. My thoughts turn toward you before I can stop them. My body knows you are near before I have even looked up. It is as though some invisible thread is tied from the center of my chest to yours, tightening whenever there is distance between us, pulling until I can think of nothing except how to get closer.

You do not have to touch me.

Your existence is enough.

One glance, and every wall inside me becomes a door.

One smile, and I forget every reason I ever had to protect myself.

One quiet word from you, and I would follow your voice into places from which I might never return.

That should frighten me more than it does.

Perhaps it does frighten me. Perhaps that is part of why I cannot look away. There is something intoxicating about knowing another person could ruin you without ever intending to. Something almost sacred about placing your heart into hands that have never asked to hold it.

You have never demanded this power over me.

That makes it worse.

I gave it to you willingly.

I placed it at your feet like an offering and watched you walk around carrying on with your life, unaware that the universe inside me had already begun revolving around you.

I know how that sounds.

I know love is not supposed to feel like worship. It is not supposed to consume the person you were before it arrived. It is not supposed to make one human being feel like the center of gravity, while everything else becomes distant, weightless, almost unreal.

But I have never known how to love in reasonable amounts.

And there is nothing reasonable about you.

There are moments when I look at you and feel as though I am witnessing something forbidden. As though no one was meant to be made with your particular combination of darkness and light. Your tenderness has teeth. Your silence has gravity. Even your sadness seems to glow around you like the dying light of a star – beautiful because it is ending, unbearable because I cannot save it.

I want to know all of you.

Not only the gentle parts you offer easily. Not only the smile you wear when the world is watching. I want the locked rooms. I want the thoughts you are ashamed of having. I want the bruised, bitter, frightened parts you keep hidden beneath your ribs.

I want the version of you that no one else is allowed to see.

I want to know what keeps you awake. What memory still makes you flinch. Whose absence taught you to expect abandonment. What you become when you are angry enough to stop pretending you are kind.

I want every shadow.

I want every wound.

I want to love the parts of you that might make someone else leave.

Maybe that is devotion.

Maybe it is obsession.

I stopped knowing the difference somewhere between wanting to understand you and wanting to crawl inside your soul until there was nowhere left in you that I had not touched.

I want to be beneath your skin.

I want to live in the quiet place your mind goes when the world becomes too loud. I want my name to appear in your thoughts without permission. I want you to feel me in empty rooms, in unfamiliar cities, in the middle of sleepless nights when there is nothing around you but darkness.

I want to haunt you gently.

I want to become the ache you do not wish to heal.

Because that is what you have become in me.

You are not simply someone I love. You are a presence that follows me into everything. You exist in songs that were written before I knew you. In skies you have never stood beneath. In dreams where you never speak, but I recognize you anyway.

The world has become infected with you.

I find pieces of you everywhere.

In the heat before a storm. In the first star visible at dusk. In the silence after someone says something too honest. In the moonlight lying across an empty bed as though it is waiting for a body that never arrived.

Even when you are absent, you are everywhere.

Especially then.

Your absence does not feel empty. It feels crowded. It fills every space with the shape of what is missing. It follows me from room to room, sits beside me, sleeps beneath my ribs.

Sometimes I miss you while you are still beside me.

That is the madness of it.

I can be close enough to hear you breathe and still feel some terrible distance between us. I can hold your hand and grieve every part of you I will never fully reach. I can look into your eyes and become homesick for a place inside you that may not even exist.

No amount of closeness is enough.

I want more than proximity.

I want recognition.

I want your soul to react to mine the way mine reacts to yours – with terror, hunger, certainty. I want something ancient inside you to awaken when I enter the room. I want your heart to lose its rhythm. I want you to look at me and feel that you have known me longer than this body, longer than this name, longer than the life we are currently living.

Because I know you.

I do not know how, but I do.

I knew you before I understood you.

Before I learned the stories that shaped you. Before I knew what made you laugh or how you behaved when you were hurt. Before I had gathered enough facts to justify the feeling, something inside me had already recognized you.

It was immediate.

Not familiarity.

Memory.

As though my soul had been waiting in darkness for centuries and opened its eyes the moment it heard your voice.

There you are.

That was the first thought.

Not, Who are you?

Not, What will you become to me?

Only:

There you are.

As if I had lost you before.

As if every life I had ever lived had ended with your name unfinished in my mouth.

Perhaps we have done this many times. Perhaps the universe keeps tearing us apart only to watch us find one another again. Perhaps we have met beneath a hundred different skies, in bodies that have long since returned to dust.

Maybe I loved you when the world had another name.

Maybe I watched you leave in lifetimes I can no longer remember, and that grief followed me here. Maybe that is why loving you contains so much fear. Why every beautiful moment with you feels shadowed by the knowledge that nothing mortal can be kept forever.

There is mourning inside my devotion.

Even when you are close, some part of me is already grieving the day you will no longer be.

I hate that time is touching you.

I hate that every moment passes through us and disappears. I hate that your face will change, that your voice will age, that this exact version of you exists only now and is dying by the second.

So I study you.

I memorize.

The way light rests against your face. The pause before you laugh. The small movements you make when you think no one is watching. I collect these details with the desperation of someone trying to save a burning house by carrying out handfuls of ash.

I want to remember everything.

I want enough of you stored inside me that even death cannot take you completely.

Perhaps that is selfish.

Perhaps all great love is selfish somewhere beneath its tenderness. We say we want the person we love to be free, but some hidden part of us still wants to be chosen above every road they could take.

I want you free.

But I want every freedom to lead you back to me.

I want every life you could build to feel slightly unfinished without my hands in it. I want every beautiful place to make you wish I were standing beside you. I want every person who tries to love you to encounter some part of you that still belongs to me.

There.

I have said the ugliest part.

I do not only want to love you.

I want to be unforgettable.

I want to leave fingerprints on your soul.

I want to become a before and an after.

I want you to measure every tenderness against mine. Every gaze. Every touch. Every silence shared between two people who are trying to understand one another.

I want to be the standard your heart cannot stop searching for.

And still, this is not about possession.

I do not want to cage you.

I want something far more frightening.

I want you to stay without being trapped.

I want you to see every exit and choose me anyway.

Again.

And again.

The way I choose you every time I see you.

Because every time I look at you, the universe repeats itself.

The first spark.

The first explosion.

The first terrible moment when matter was thrown into darkness and taught how to become stars.

That is what happens inside me.

A universe begins.

And then another.

And another.

You are a cosmic collision that never finishes occurring. Each encounter rearranges me. Each glance destroys some small version of who I was before it. I walk away carrying the same name, the same body, the same face – but nothing inside me remains where it was.

You alter my orbit.

You disturb my tides.

You make every buried thing rise.

Around you, I am both more alive and less my own.

I lose myself, but it does not feel like disappearing. It feels like expansion. Like I have mistaken my entire life for one small room, and you have torn the roof away to reveal the endless night above it.

Still, there is danger in becoming infinite for someone.

There is danger in making a home inside a person who can leave.

I know this.

I know you are human. I know your heart is not a sacred object placed on this earth only for me. I know you have your own distances, your own choices, your own unknowable interior.

I know that one day you could turn away.

And I know I would survive.

That is perhaps the darkest truth.

I would continue breathing.

The sun would rise.

People would speak to me, and I would answer them. I would eat, sleep, move through the world. I would become skilled at appearing alive.

But some celestial body inside me would remain permanently ruined.

There would always be a dead star where you once burned.

That is the power you have.

Not the power to end my life.

The power to divide it.

Into the time before I knew you, the time I was allowed to love you, and everything that came after.

Yet even knowing this, I cannot love you less.

I have tried to make the feeling smaller. I have tried to name it chemistry, longing, projection, madness – anything that might make it manageable.

But human explanations cannot contain it.

What I feel for you belongs to the language of black holes and eclipses. Of celestial bodies drawn toward one another across impossible distances. Of stars devouring themselves to create the elements from which another world might someday be born.

Loving you feels like destruction with a purpose.

Like ruin that creates.

Like a beautiful death from which something holy emerges.

And so, every time I see you, I fall.

Not because I have forgotten that I already love you.

Because love has no bottom where you are concerned.

There is always another darkness beneath the darkness.

Another universe beneath the one I thought was endless.

Another version of you waiting to undo me.

I fall for the person you were yesterday.

I fall for the person standing before me now.

I fall for every version of you I will never live long enough to meet.

I fall knowing you may never understand the scale of what happens inside me when you look my way. How one careless glance can turn my blood into starlight. How the smallest tenderness from you can keep me alive for days. How easily you could become my salvation or my undoing without ever meaning to be either.

Maybe that is what frightens me most.

You are simply existing.

And I am turning it into eternity.

Still, if I had to choose again, knowing the risk, knowing the grief hidden inside every beautiful thing, I would choose this.

I would choose the obsession.

The terror.

The unbearable sweetness of recognizing your soul and having no proof that it recognizes mine.

I would choose to be ruined by the sight of you.

I would choose every collision.

Every death.

Every rebirth.

Because there are worse things than losing yourself in someone.

There is living an entire life without ever meeting a person who makes you understand why the universe created gravity.

So let me fall.

Let me love you with all the darkness and starlight in me.

Let me be pulled apart and remade.

And when I see you tomorrow, or years from now, or in some other life beneath a sun neither of us has ever known, let it happen again.

Let my soul turn toward yours before I remember your name.

Let the universe inside me collapse.

Let every star ignite.

Let me look at you with the same terror, the same devotion, the same impossible certainty and think:

There you are.

There you are again.

I have loved you before.

I will love you after.

And I am falling into you all over again.