There is something in me that always wants more. More time with someone I like. More conversations, more touch, more laughter. More falling in love, hopefully together. And I think I understand why now.

As a child, I was alone. Surrounded by siblings old enough or young enough to be distant but still present. I would ride my bike for hours out in the heat. Alone. I would ride down alleyways discovering petty secrets. I would ride for miles down back streets in the quiet empty of the asphalt heat ocean. I would come back home and gulp down water and read some book meant for adults, having long since out read the local library of children’s offerings. The crackle of the polyurethane dust jacket and the silent turning of pages. Days and days left alone, because I didn’t seem to need attention, and others did.

I grew up filling this vast uncharted lonely expanse with temporary friends, ideas, and intense desire for a connection. But, I was both shy and quick witted, stung by others comments I would carve out their hearts with a sharp tongue and feel flushed with guilt and triumph. And I watched as others who seemed normal to me found connections and were seemingly happy. It looked so easy for them. Like breathing.

I turned to computers and twisted even further inward. My family emphasized practicality and money. I lost myself. And by the time I surfaced, I was successful and faceless. People knowing me was dangerous so no one did. Certainly not my family. And there was no one else. Until Morgan shattered my world. And everything changed. Like waking from a coma to find the world had moved on. Briefly, through, seemingly no action I took other than saying yes at the right moment, I was whole. She filled me in ways I’m still aching from.

Because well, you can read about Morgan on your own.

And I was so numb after, I just didn’t notice. But I started waking up almost four years ago. And that intense need for connection drives me. I fall in love. It’s not attachment. I’m not a baby bird. I just see people and they are beautiful. How can I not love them? I’m learning to suppress it but love always bursts out. Connection. More. An intense need to have them see themselves how I see them. To help them.

I don’t get people who don’t know if they have ever felt love. There are people who I would shift the world for, if I could.

But I think they see that empty vastness inside me. I understand how it’s too much. No one can fill it. No single person. But you wouldn’t be. I have friends, fellow poets and writers. Sometimes the vast empty swallows me and I seem like I’m way too much too soon. I’m sorry for that.

And a part of me says, “stay, just stay.” and another part whose all too familiar, knows that you’ll go, and another part would do much to be proven wrong and fill the vast empty with something other than echos.