Unfamiliar

He's not familiar yet. I'm not yet used to him. His presence in my doorway is not yet commonplace, the sight of his shoulders twisting to displace the air inside the sweatshirt wrangled over his head: these things are still new. Still a surprise.

Yet the ease of his company, how to explain? It's as if I've known him far longer than these few short months. He's not familiar, but he's becoming home. I'm not self-conscious in his company. I'm not worried about how I must come across. Wait -- I am, sometimes, but he gazes at me with such affection that when squeaks of insecurity do rise, they become muffled by his warm embrace.

Our first trip away together this past weekend: magic! He woke in the dead of the night, reached for me, murmured sleepily, "love of my life" into my hair and fell deeply back into slumber.  I don't have an inner filmmaker and I quite clumsily write about romance when I try, but if I were good at any of those things, if I had some kind of aspiring vision for how to craft the perfect chick flick, that'd be there. If I hadn't already been in love, I'd have fallen right that instant.

On the bus ride home, we were casually interlaced; his nose in a book and me going through a list of articles I saved to read on my phone. The list was quite long, some I'd added last year and not yet read. He peered up to see what I was doing, my steady swiping motion piquing interest. I was deleting titles like, "How To Get Over Him" and "Will He Ever Love Me" when I simultaneously noticed both his gaze and how pathetic my list, normally full of science articles, had suddenly become. I felt the need to explain, but he squeezed me and said, "I don't think you have to worry about that anymore."

And that is the power of being loved.

...Which is also not familiar yet.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength,
while loving someone deeply gives you courage." ~Lao Tzu