You haven’t told him you love him yet, because he won’t let you.

We’re starting over, remember? He’d explained, over candles and grilled cheese and four years boiling down to this, I don’t want you to feel pressured.

You didn’t argue because you’d gotten whiplash from how fast your life had been changing compared to the years behind it and maybe slowing down wasn’t such a bad idea.

But you know you’re breaking your promise every time he looks straight through you and something in your gut is whispering to him, and when he takes your hand and the pulse that he can measure in your fingers tap out those three words over and over in Morse code. You imprint it on every jellybean, hoping that when it slides against his tongue he’ll just know.

But then he glances over at you (but you really can’t call it a glance because there’s nothing accidental or fleeting about it) and you’re cheeks burn from smiling too much and your eyelashes seem longer for some reason and he looks the same way that you feel… and you know that he knows.

You breathe.

It’s the silences that say it. It’s all the tiny gaps between words that seem to stretch into gaping chasms when you let them and most of the time you want to let them. To pull yourself taught inside them, brace you palms and your heels along the inhale and exhale and be happy just knowing that you can. It’s the feeling like you’re constantly testing your boundaries, only now you’re the ones to draw its borders like little dotted shapes on a treasure map. Like you were water inside a glass but now the glass is gone and you’re just realizing it, just starting to gush into the air and discover that this is what being alive is.

It’s the silent looks and the subtle touches and knowing that you can, you can, you can.

It’s all the simple things that you can really only see because you’re this close, or because you’re this far away, but maybe it’s both because you notice everything and nothing at the same time.

It’s discovering in a world of kaleidoscope chatters and the hum of needless machinery that the words are unnecessary and that you can just be for the only time in forever.

It’s knowing that nows are only meantimes and the past isn’t dead just slowing fading to watermark and that tomorrow is simply a sliver of forever.

It’s walking hip to hip and recognizing the whisper of your words it the shuffle of the fabric.

I know you. I missed you. I love you. Stay.