My Constant Star In The Heavens (2/21)

This is another sort of freeform journaling exercise about the love of my life! I love Siena so much and I loved dating her and now I love being engaged to her! Just putting thoughts and feelings on paper, rather artlessly, but I just have emotions I wanna get out!

           When I arrived on campus my freshman year, I had only drank twice before. Once was an ill-fated house party that was cancelled because a cop car drove by one time (I still was asked to pay $40 for the alcohol of which I’d had one bad mixed drink and an Angry Orchard), the other was Prom Weekend. Nicholas and I shared a fifth of Captain Morgan and a lot of coke and Hawaiian Punch.

    When I got to college and got drunk, there were a lot of emotions that bubbled out because I did not know how to process the abundant love I had in my heart. I cried to friends about how much I loved them, loved my life, but most often I gushed about Siena and how much I loved her. Drunk Sean™ left sometime around Sophomore Year, as I learned to better handle emotions, alcohol, and emotions and alcohol. My drunken professions of love to Siena stopped being so frequent though the emotions never left.

    So here I am, stone cold sober, making up for lost time.

I’ve been the luckiest person in the world for nine years, three months, and fifteen days, because for that duration I have been with Siena and she makes my heart so happy. It’s impossible to really quantify, or to explain the love, because she is so entwined in the warp and weft of my soul. I really cannot imagine my life, much less myself, without her. We’re like two trees who grew close together on a river bank, and our trunks grew and twisted around the other. I don’t exist without her, not in a meaningful way.

I started this writing project because I wanted to get more confident with my writing. I have a lot rattling in my head that lives there and never makes it to paper. I tell Siena, with frequency, that I wish I could write poetry because I’d write so much about her. There’s a freight train in my heart that is screaming down the track, there are so many thoughts and feelings and emotions that I feel about her that I can’t possibly articulate in the artistry they deserve. Is poetry bad if it’s earnest? I’m not a poet. These are philosophical questions I am not equipped to tackle.

I just wouldn’t want to sell her short. She has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen and I love the way the light catches them. I swoon when she looks at me because those eyes were what bowled me over the first (well, second) time I met her. I was struck dumb. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen was turning those gorgeous eyes to look at me! What luck.

But I don’t have the words for it. I described her eyes to her as “smooth”, which is not really one of the words that comes to mind when discussing an implacable and indescribable beauty that turns your knees to jelly. I called them smooth because the irises are smooth. The color is solid all the way through, there are no crags or peaks or scratchy areas like so many of our eyes have. The topography of her iris is that of Nebraska. It is smooth and solid and her eyes look as pure and bright as if they were painted on. I don’t have the poetry for it, I don’t have the vocabulary, and so I can only describe the most wondrous things that I am blessed enough to stare into as “smooth”. There is nothing romantic about Nebraska, nothing at all, and yet that’s what my mind spits out. I don’t have the poetry for it.

I love her smile. I love when she smiles at me and I love the way her whole face lights up around that perfect smile. There’s no poetry for it. I’m far from Parnassus, home of the Muses, and I am struggling to piece together words beyond “teeth” and “smile” to describe something more dear and beautiful to me than the sunrise.

She is the kindest person I’ve ever known, someone who deserves comparisons to historical and literary figures far beyond my ken. She is loving and devoted and so, so compassionate to everyone she comes across. She is the example I attempt to follow every day, and every day I spend in her light drives me to be a better person. I don’t have poetry for it. I don’t have the purple prose to make it all sound right. Anything less than sonnets and poems, of flowery language that should be translated from French or Arabic, feels lackluster. It does not, and cannot, come close to capturing the joy I feel every morning I wake up knowing that she is in my life. And not just my life, all lives. The world is better for her existence. There are so many people who make this world worse. There are a blessed few whose presence is the rising tide that lifts all ships. Siena is one of those people.

It is the most marvelous feeling in the world falling in love for the first time. This is dwarfed, in my experience, by the feeling of knowing you’re falling in love for the only time. I don’t have the language to express that further than how I have. She is my first, last, and only love. Her life gives mine direction. We were put on the earth to find each other and be together. Her joy is my joy, and my joy is her. This should rhyme, imagine all these emotions rhyme and have meters and scansion. 

When we said “I love you” for the first time, I began it with the words “I think”. I had never felt the way I did with anyone else. I felt like the cracks in my life were filled by her presence and there was a gyroscope spinning in my chest. Everything in my life was caught in the pull of it, the threads of stress and worry were pulled into that whirring sphere of light and all that was left was her. All that is left is her. I had no idea what feelings I was feeling but I assumed they were love but I was too scared to come out and say it in case she didn’t feel the same. I said I think I love her. I know now. I know it more than anything else. It’s a truth that is as important and as mundane to me as my heart pumping blood is.

In a world where the goal wasn’t to write 1,000 words, any 1,000 words, I would throw myself against the wall of trying to describe the impossible love I feel. The indescribable light that she ignites in my heart just by the very knowledge of knowing she exists. Knowing that we’re the others’ forever and always.
I’ve been the luckiest guy in the world for nine years, three months, and fifteen days. I just wish I were also lucky enough to be a poet.