Defiant Authenticity

I want you to be defiant in your authenticity.

Please walk up to me and meet my eyes with a promise in them that you will never hide who you are with me.

It was so easy to type out my thoughts to you until it came time to hit send.

As quickly as I wrote to you, I retracted each word.

Two sentences, and I backed out before sending it.

Problem: I don’t want the formalities of strangers. I don’t want to pretend.

I don’t want the polite thank you from you like you give everyone else.

Unlike the person I want to be with you, my words were restrained.

I speak of wanting you to be who you are.

I won’t be a hypocrite and hide who I am from you.

I clung to each sentence that you wrote about the other day.

I reread what you wrote at least twenty times in the hopes that the feelings you evoked in me through your words would somehow stop the desire that was building within me.

That is not what happened; it was quite the contrary.

My body trembled and felt hot.

It was as if you were standing in front of me, almost naked, bearing all of your strength and confidence in each paragraph.

There was a passion that I had not heard from you in anything else I have read from what you have written.

Is it selfish of me to hope that that was for me?

Did you need to prove that you are far from black and white?

You teased me with this glimpse of who I swear I have always known you to be.

Your admiration for the subject that you wrote about was palpable.

I felt you.

The intensity you revealed in each letter of every word you wrote is in your eyes.

It has been there for me since I first looked at your picture.

In your words, I felt a fire within you, longing to be released.

I never wanted to stop reading.

At that moment, the only thing I wanted more than to keep reading your words was to have you read your words to me.

To have your voice filled with all that emotion close to my skin.

I fantasized that every vibration of your sound was breathless against my neck as your hands gripped my hair to the side.

You pulled me into you so you could whisper all that you wrote against the arch of my back.

I can only imagine that if you were that close, I would need distance from you to clear my head.

I would need to avoid your eyes.

I would need to avoid your hands.

I tell myself to focus.

Once again, I read everything and concentrated on every detail of what you had just taught.

You may be angry that I do not remember the details.

I loved all of it, but what stood out for me was not about him.

What stood out was you.

What I went to bed thinking about was not him.

I fell asleep; my last thought was of you, wanting only you and your defiance.