You’re sitting in your bedroom with the girl that you love.  She’s trembling and shy in the privacy of that room, and your thoughts are coming slow under the weight of fear.  You know that she loves you but there’s always been walls behind you and the people you care about.  A blurry line where the anxiety draws a line between you and others.  A space where connection dies in your dumb fumbling with words.  

But she sees something in you that you can’t see yet that makes trying to cross that ravine worth it.  And she kisses you.  You’ve taken every moment before to steal the press of her mouth against yours.  It feels like winter fading into spring.  It feels like the first rays of a sunrise on your face.  This time it feels different.  This time you reach up and gently pull her closer, this time you remember to close your eyes, this time you kiss her like you’re telling her that you love her without using your voice.

And this time it’s different.  The soft and wet touch of her lips is still there, but you feel something else igniting in your blood, burning down from your head into your gut.  You feel comfortable in a way you really had never felt before.  You feel safe, you feel loved, you feel confident.  It feels like home and you discover that home is somewhere near infinity and home is everything you’ve been missing at night.  

Infinity fills up the aching gaps of emptiness that keep you up at night.  It calls you good enough in a tone you can’t deny.  It holds you in the cold.  It lets you be vulnerable and you find out for the first time in your life what it’s like to breathe freely.  

The girl that you love breaks away before the fire can consume you, but it still licks and burns in your bones, lingering in your spaces.  You decide it was a good thing she had stopped there.  You see in her eyes that she felt the power of the heat, and you fool yourself that she felt the infinity as well.  You won’t find out until later that she didn’t.  

It doesn’t matter yet.  You throw your arms around her and hold you close, telling her that you love her over and over.  A quieter voice whimpers please don’t leave me but you barely hear it in the roar of giddy freedom.  She giggles in a way that makes you smile from ear to ear and tells you that she loves you too.  You know that she means it.

And you go back downstairs, hand and hand, and you’re happy in a way that can’t be shook by a stray thought.  It’s new.  You’re excited for the next time you’ll be able to taste that fire again.  You don’t really care if it destroys you or consumes you.  You want more.

You find out later that no matter how hot it burns, it never breaks you.  The love deepens and widens but it never leaves you charred and shattered.  You find out even later that fire only destroys you when she snuffs it out.