when the sky is high and the ocean is deep; when the wind is singing and the stars are sighing; when the trees are whispering secrets of life into open ears and when the soil is warming under the waking sun: these are the moments in which i know. these are the moments in which i can tell. it is the moment between the silence and the breath between the words. it is the moment when time suspends and the pencil stills and the sentences don't flow, but rather clog and jam and fold unto themselves so that they are impossible to pick apart and understand.

these are the moments in which i know.

it is the moment when you first wake and your first motion isn't to stretch or yawn or awaken your slumbering muscles, but rather to pull me closer into the radiating heat of your chest. it is the moment when the afternoon has stilled and the noise has muted and in the middle of the mundane normalcy you look my way and somehow turn the most ordinary of minutes into something more. it is the moment that i   stretch my thoughts past the borders of myself and expand to the ends of the globe and recognize that i will never find something like it. in the heat of the desert, in the heart of the jungle, at the height of the mountains, at the depth of the sea. i can stretch the map and tear at state lines; i can gnash at equators and swallow rivers and i will never spit up another jewel as beautiful and precious as the one sitting in the middle of my palm.

it is these emotions that swell in my stomach and snap my bones so that they might grow instead. it is these emotions that rearrange my cells and create, stitch, heal something new where something broken had previously been. these emotions that warm my winter's heart and cool my summer's ache. they soothe my weathered soul, wipe my brow and invigorate my tongue with the promise of everlasting water.  they are the beauty of the moonstar and the normalcy of the morning's rays. they are ethereal and ordinary and perfect and flawed. they are everything at once so that i am praying and worshiping and falling to my knees to soak it all in.

and the moment i know is the moment i see, the moment my eyes are open so that i might finally understand the air that i breathe and the water that i drink and the sustenance that feeds my soul. the incomprehensible and the impossible and the incorrigible; the tides washing up against my veins to fuel my limbs to push me through my day. i cannot define it and i cannot explain it and the words that i spit up do naught but to outline the blurred shadow that chases it. i am incapable of showing and ineffective at describing and unwilling to give it up so that i might dissect and put it on display. so take the words and swallow and wrap your mind around the millennia of hearts beating in time with mine:

i am in love, i am in love, i am in love.