Love, The Fertilizer

I am in love again.

After the storms of doubt and fear,
after relationships that left me hollow,
after learning how to protect my heart
pretending I didn't need anyone—

Here I am. Heart open. Trembling. She grasped me. Simply that. No grand entrance. No warning. She entered quietly
and somehow awakened the poetry
I had buried inside of me.

I cannot look at her
without wanting to kiss the sunlight
that walks in her eyes. There is something about her. Something I cannot quite explain
without reducing it.

She is an angel
wandering safely among beasts,
moving through the loneliest paths,
the darkest trails,
as if she knows something
the rest of us have forgotten.

And I smile.

My soul dances.

That smile of hers— a torch through the night,
a compass when I don't know
where I am going.

I smile at her, and somehow, she becomes a mirror
showing me a joy
I had forgotten buried inside me.

She is a color
I never expected. A color across the wheel from mine. Different from me. Older than me by years. Different in ways
I could never have predicted.

And yet—

we harmonize.

Maybe that is what color was trying to teach me
all those years ago. That difference does not have to divide us. Sometimes difference is exactly
what makes the painting work.

We don't erase each other's colors. We don't ask the other to become less of herself. We embrace the difference. And somehow, we become brighter together.

I once asked my students
to imagine a world without color.

“Could you see yourselves?”

At first, some of them shrugged. They didn't understand the question. Then, slowly,
the truth began to settle in.

Without color, some of us would disappear. Without color, the world would lose its language.

All colors matter.

And maybe that is what I was trying to teach them. Maybe I was teaching myself. Every difference matters. Every shade. Every light. Every shadow. Every strange combination

We never imagined we would belong together. The differences between her and me
do not make the painting incomplete. They make it ours. They turn the world into a painting
I don't want to put down.

I am in love. I say it now
without hiding behind metaphors.

I am in love. And after everything— after the leaving,
the loneliness,
the fear,
the people I lost,
the places I crossed,
the parts of myself I thought were gone—

I have found my color.

And for now, that is enough.

I am in love. And in this love, I have found my color.

An extract from the book, “Inside A Blackhead” by Julio Desmont