I love wildly, but not naively. I care passionately, but always purposely. I am soft, but also strong.
Catalog
Marisa Donnelly
Marisa Donnelly graduated Summa Cum Laude from Waldorf University in May 2015 with a B.S. in Secondary English Education, a B.A. in English, and a B.A. in Creative Writing with endorsements in Secondary Reading and Coaching. She is a Midwest-born, West Coast-based writer, poet, essayist and licensed teacher working as a full-time Staff Writer and Editor/Producer for Thought & Expression Co.
You were never foolish for kissing him, for looking deep into his eyes, for losing your footing like a teenager, stumbling and drunk on love.
You were young, And you were searching, even then. But you were trying to make homes out of temporary people. Trying to find yourself in the body of a stranger who could never fill you, never complete you, never satisfy the longing in your chest to be both protected and set free, both loved and let…
Real love is never about the hours the months the years nestling between two bodies. With you and I, the clock will never stand a chance.
Now I understand time never mattered with love—with us. You can’t erase a person’s touch from your memory or stop your heart from beating at the mention of a name.
Sometimes life is simple, my feet on the dashboard your fingers in my hair the windows down and our worries in the rearview.
You’re still the green-grey eyes, the laugh that warms me. You’re still the unbrushed hair. And I promise I’ll run my fingers through the tangles. Promise I’ll kiss every lonely strand, every broken follicle. Until you can taste the forever on my lips.
I called you last night. Because I saw the picture, because I wanted to know if your voice still sounded like Saturday mornings with closed blinds, an old truck with the windows down on the highway in the sticky-hot Western sun. Yes, you did. Your voice brought me to all the places I’d been…
You leave because you don’t love him. You leave because you do.
Maybe we’ll always be connected across the expanse of space and sky, and when I lift my head from the pillow, you’ll feel my energy too. You’ll wonder why you’ve felt so restless ever since I left.
Our connection is paper thin—or, like sutures, weaving through the sinews of my heart, stitching fragments of you to me, of me to you to your chest cavity, laying claim, filling those hollow spaces, making you whole so you won’t miss me, haven’t missed me since I’ve been gone.
I wonder if you know I still think about you every time I drive the gravel backroad where we first kissed, electricity between us sparking white against that night sky like fireflies.
you were the only man who made me believe even those born to run might learn to slow down.
You will always remind me of late nights on I-35, Three Musketeers bars melting chocolate all over my fingers and you laughing, leaning in to kiss the sweetness from my lips.
If you are the wind, I am a dandelion seed, twisting spinning, caught in your embrace, traveling miles, seeing a sky I’d never dreamed.
I tried to kiss away the emptiness screaming ‘I love you’ into the spaces as if I could fill him, us. He was my first experience with transience— searching for a residence in the impermanent.
I was dizzy in love with the idea of love so much so I expected boys who were not men to chase me when what I really wanted was to chase everything that didn’t taste like home.
I’ve been smiling at temporary faces looking into temporary eyes kissing temporary lips touching temporary bodies searching for you.