This is for my sisters with hopeful dreams and starry eyes.

This is for my men in broken down rusted armor, grandmothers dreaming by a slow burning fire and those who thought it would never come, whose hearts have all but given up, whose tears taste like an icy winter storm; I promise this is for you:

We crave a love that time will lie down and be still for

We crave a love that smells like the heavy sweet night air on a summer evening

One that tastes like ripened elderberries and honey

We crave a love that is as endless as the sea, and as reliable as the moon

One that feels like Egyptian cotton on bare skin and sunrise’s collarbone kisses

We crave something that is vast and unknown, yet feels like home. We want someone to give us shaking knees, but yet a steady hand; unpredictability, but stability. We crave to be seen for all that we are, and accepted for even more. We want Sunday morning cartoons, and Saturday night cabaret.

We are the hopeful ones, the dreamers. We write poetry with our hearts, and sing melodies with our kisses. We make life interesting… Hell, Screw that, we make life worth living.

We are the colors in a sunset, and the salt on an afternoon margarita. We are fireflies floating over the field at twilight, and the soft ocean breeze; we are simply your greatest wish come true.

We believe in love even when life has given us every opportunity not to and we have lost the ability to settle for anything less than that toe curling, heart dropping, face flushed, once in a lifetime kind of love.

We have no use for shallow attention, or someone to fill the silence, because we gulp it down like the last of our Imperial stout, thick and rich over our moist lips.

We are those who love ourselves, our peace, and our moments of solitude in this life that sometimes is overwhelming in its realness.

What we crave is the extraordinary, the one that we read about as children and almost have forgotten about. We want someone to look at us like we are the greatest mystery they have ever seen, yet in the same gaze, they can see us for all that we are. We want laughter and passion, tenderness and confidence, magic and reality.

We want it all.

What we crave, we might always long for, for we know there are no guarantee. But we just can’t do it; we can’t compromise, and we can most certainly not pretend that what we want looks like anything that most people are satisfied by.

We don’t want the cookie cutter box store type of love.

Nah, what we crave is that tiny boutique tucked along a meandering street in the old port; one whose windows are slightly dusty, whose sign can’t quite be deciphered, because if it really is that wonderful it certainly doesn’t need to be announced with lights and glitz. We want merchandise traded from across the seven seas: butter soft suede duvets, and silken robes the color of amethyst, bowls of white roses, thorns and all, cinnamon and cardamom, and rich oils that smell like fire and seawater.

We want not just the moonrise, but the sunrise too, snow topped mountains, and languid sandy beaches.

And even though we may still go to bed each evening alone, with only our sheets grazing our soft skin, we know it exists, that which we crave the most.

We see it in our dreams, and wake with its taste upon our lips.

So maybe we know there is no guarantee, but there is hope.

And if we can have hope that even after the most harshest of winters the beauty of spring will return, then we have to believe too, that there will be a time, maybe even sooner than we expect, when we will blossom into our own kind of spring.

And there’s no doubt it will be beautiful because aren’t the very best things, also those worth waiting for the most.

“If we had no winter the spring would not be so pleasant.” ~ Anne Bradstreet

 

Relephant Reads:

How to Love Better: Mindfulness in Relationships.

 

Author: Kate Rose

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photos: Tina Stanley at Pixoto