Creepers

I hate how scared I am of growth. Of things changing and taking on new shapes. Of new places, of movements, of new thoughts emerging and old ones dying out.

I hate how quickly the growth spreads through me, like a creeper well sustained by rain and sun. How quick the world changes, how hard and hopeless and yet how incorrigibly free. How loud the voices of my people sing out in the gathering dark.

I don’t like change, yet I change, all the time, and so does things around me. Every little change dances through the pathways in my mind as I overthink them into twisted frenzies and the night slowly fades into dawn outside my window.

I don’t like how I have to reevaluate and rearrange things every time something changes; within or without. My laundry piles up and my wardrobe gets dusty, yet life forces through all the cobwebs I have put up in my defence. I hate how excited I get, I hate how scared I get.

I get scared because change is arbitrary. It doesn’t happen at the same pace in everyone at the same time. I stumble through a revelation only to find out I have left people behind. It can get very lonely very quick, in this new place I have suddenly grown into. I would have loved to stay back; I’d still have people who think the same. But I can’t. Life kicked me into marching off to this new territory where I don’t know anyone.

I get scared because every time I change I worry about going away from you. You, of warm cuddles and sweet nothings, you who go soft every time I touch your lips and go still every time I lean against you. You, of deep waters and dark forests, the peace of a lifetime descends upon me when I feel your breath on my face.

I worry, what if this growth disturbs this peace, what if I grow in a different direction? I am like a creeper, growing despite myself, lost in the undergrowth.

But then I see you again, on the way up. You are blooming too, in different colours and in different directions, but always beside me.

Love is like this I guess, finding a creeper of the same kind. We grow differently, but we grow together. We shoot up our blooms and shake our heads at the sun, and reach down to the depth of the earth for the primal water of our souls – together.

I couldn’t sleep today, because things are changing again. But then you spoke to me, and I remembered, right in the middle of this mad, mad world, I still got a fellow creeper who is growing just beside me, adjusting to each of my new curves, sharing the water, sharing the earth.

I love you.

Cover image by artist Gabriel Pacheo, sourced from the page A Way to Blue.