Sneaky

So this is how it happens. As easy and simply as that.

Love has never been forward with me. It does not announce itself, ring the doorbell, show up in a fanfare of trumpets and exultation. It does not appear noisily, or busily, or colorfully. It sneaks in. It is covert, subtle, as quiet as summer air hanging heavy in the trees and as sweet and soft as breathing. It slips in like the last person to arrive at a party, easing open the door and standing in the back of the room, unobtrusive.

But then I begin to notice it in degrees: the small sigh when I'm held tightly, the way his eyes remind me of songs that I sing out loud, the almost-imperceptible hitch in his breathing when I wind my legs around his in the early hours of the morning. This is how love sneaks in, climbs in, sets up shop in a small little corner of my heart, and every hour when I'm sharing his laughter and inhaling his sweet smell, Love moves his furniture out a little further, tends his garden more closely, lights a fire in the grate. Love makes himself at home in the furthest stretches of my heart and then lets himself grow.

And one day, there it is. Not back in the corners, but fully and completely a part of me. Love has stolen the pieces of me, little ones at a time, and then it is morning and I am awake and find myself consumed.

I love him with pieces of me that didn't know how. And this is how it happens. With a flutter of his eyelashes. With the quickened pace of his pulse. With us lying in the Sunday morning sun, watching the light change through the slats of the windows, my hand pressed firmly against the skin that encompasses his own beating, breathing, bursting heart.