At night on the highway, when I pick you up from your apartment, we fall, once again, into the rhythm of our togetherness. Lingering glances, touches that carry intention beyond simple contact, grins that struggle against containment – this is the series of symptoms we brave upon entering each other’s atmosphere; as inevitable and expected as shivering is upon entering a snowy wood. I look back at you looking ahead at me, your head tipped back in rest. You are looking at me, and it's as if you cradle the whole world in the crook of your neck.

Did you know that intensity could be such a delicate thing as this?

I learned this from you; but did you teach this to me?

Or like children in a garden absentmindedly kicking rocks and finding an entire world burrowed below their feet, was this discovery happened upon together?

You trust your gentle gaze to tell me that you aren’t just beholding me but that I am held by you. Really, though, it’s the delicate curve of your neck, the airy angle at which you turned and dropped your head – like a leaf kissing wet asphalt after falling slowly from a tree; now still, now rested – it’s that gentle curve of your neck that unveils your meaning to me.

Without speaking you talk of intensity, how its magnitude can be felt through gentle reverberations; how it isn’t like the crash of a big ocean wave as I had once guessed and hoped it might be – explosive and bewildering, so strong its majesty forces you to prepare, to hold fast upon its arrival; how I once thought its terror – when you are inside of it – overwhelms its beauty and, in so doing, your ability to see the wave for what it is; how it leaves you suspended in an inhale, your eyes clenched shut; how you grip yourself, tense and flexed, against the water’s natural movement, your whole body working to come up on the other side, to wipe the salt from your eyes, to breathe, to say I am alive I am alive I am alive; how despite not having seen the wave’s crash, you think you know it – even better than those looking on from the shore – because you have felt it, because you have been swept away by it.

But now – you tell me to look ahead.

Now – I look at the shore encased by your steadiness and attention,

your glittering wit and wayward eye. Now –

Love is the ocean when the ocean is a sleeping woman.

Intensity a newly discovered awareness of carefulness.

You walk me into the water; anticipation dissolves what nowness engulfs.

With you I tread, I float, in and on the small, residual waves – the ones that follow a monumental one. Intensity that is not the moment of impact but that space of reflection. I tread these delicate, lapping waves that daintily slop against my shoulders, that lift me up and down like a reader’s inflection when reciting verse in iambic pentameter; like a hand raising a tea bag from a mug; the waves that move me as if I’m a pen and the ocean is writing a series of lower-case “r”s in cursive. These reverberations hit me with a slight chill, greeting my shoulders in a manner that’s almost polite in its suddenness, an abruptness that seeks not a gasp of shock from me, but a smile from my surprise. The water holds me like an unexpected hug from behind. A feeling so suspended that it feels so forever, just for a moment; so immediate that it might always be so. Because now feels, or can feel, like always.

The water holds me.

You hug me from behind.

***

The waves of intensity are waves that lift, that carry and protect. They are the waves that make floating into a grounded flying. A wave arrives; your eyelash, like seaweed, flutters against my arm. A wave arrives; your vibrato fills my atmosphere like the tide kissing the sand. A wave arrives; you laugh; are laughing; are seeing and laughing and dreaming.

***

The waves of my love curve with a tranquil air; inextricable; all-consuming; there’s no point in pinpointing. You lay by my side, my arm around your head. I glide my fingers through your hair, your face nestled gently in the curve of my neck.

I remember the earlier drive home. I remember how I saw you seeing me.

Your ear on my chest, you fall fast asleep to the rhythm of my heartbeat like a secret lullaby, like the tide cooing and shushing.

The waves are careful, intensity delicate. They whisper.

They tell me that I am cradling the whole world in the crook of my neck.