You were born 6 years before I was.
In those 6 years, and a trillion years before that,
I was floating up in space
All light and bliss and orbit,
No grief or hurt or bitterness, all poetry
And no language, not a single need
For words like forgiveness.
I was up there making snow angels
In the star dust
When i glanced down and saw you on a playground
Shy as a comet, chewing on your hair.
I turned to the Milky Way and said
I found her. Get me down there.
The first time we were face to face
It was a Sunday in New Orleans.
Holy as you are, i'm pretty certain
You were high as a kite. And i wanted to be the key
Tied the end of that string catching all of your electricity.
When I finally got the nerve to kiss you
We were in the Colorado desert
Beneath the same night sky
You would point to the months later and say, Baby,
We could make any of those specks of light
The Big Dipper if we drew the lines right.
I suppose it was all that possibility
That made us both so bad at actually knowing
Where to draw the line.
Me, running down the street chasing your taxi,
Crying at the top of my lungs. I mean
The absolute rooftop of my skyscraper lungs.
You deboarding the airplane
With your suitcase still on it,
Racing back home to find my heart
A burning piano.
We were never easy
We never slept like rocks
Without worrying we would wake like volcanos?
We could be so explosive
I started thinking a good day is a slow burn.
But then we would start talking about the ocean
I remember how the salt curled your hair,
Or how you blushed in the kitchen
When the radio show
On the stereo started making you cry.
I got so desperate to learn
How people reach each other
I couldn't stop running around
Cursing our city for the day it started burying
The telephone wires underground.
For that crushing first fight
When we spent all night trying to gather the wine
Back into the grape
For every promise we broke
Like bread in hopes of feeding ourselves better
The last time I watched you paint your toenails in my bed
I remember the first time I heard someone say
Half the stars we see in the sky are already dead
Maybe that's what happened
Maybe we were already gone
Before we ever met