My International American Dream Poem by Leah Ayliffe

When he leaves,
or I leave,
as we always must,
I am left feeling full of life.
Not like how I was before he danced into my world,
drained, exhausted, looking for a way to be.
To be.

Never dreaming that I could be a real kind of happy.

It's a curious thing when your whole time here since the first breathe, you know
that you were born missing something
though you never could quite pin it down
what that empty space was waiting for.
Little things that sustained me during the years
Distractions from running and chasing down what it could be,
trying to discover what cord fit with me to spark an electricity through my veins, my mind.
I had an idea that I tried to silence, that a person couldn't be the answer.
Scared to believe that human connection is the essence of living, afraid I was alone out in the sea, the only fish swimming in circles that looped a little bigger but always ended back in the same beginning every time.
Until you knocked me out of my endless wandering.

You knocked me out of my endless wandering,
the running and skipping and tripping over the same philosophical wars that inspired and destroyed me.

You, strong, bold and confident in being exactly you.
Dreaming gorgeous things into what I always saw as a cruel world.
Your minds a diamond and your soul electric,
I think maybe I've cooled down but you take me and make me higher.
I am quite deranged in my ways but you're different too.
You're different and walk with fire in the rarity of people like you.
A rare breed of man I never thought could be found on this earth.
You found me. Or maybe you made me found. I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel found out in a terribly wonderful way.

You dance, you fight, you play and laugh.
Sometimes you feel isolated and alone
but you love yourself.
You run on adrenaline, seeking thrills and creating waves of thrill to those who surround you.
Radiating light like a star.
I wonder if you know that it's true.
I think you do.
If others saw you like I do, I don't know how it could be that you are still travelling around cities and town without someone who adores you in everything you are.
The Go-Getter, trend setter, hungry for knowledge and doing everything to be the better man.
The Renaissance Man.
Playing guitar in the night, reading Spanish in the days.
Writing poetry like a God, athletically driven - always working on that bod.
Seeking new adventures, new ideas to make real.
Sharing the knowledge to those who dare to listen.
A real life Renaissance Man,
and they said they died off in the Romantic Age of literature.

I don't like to think of time as this linear thing we are trapped in. Rather, it is fluid, that goes back and forth to the future and the past. Are we ever in the now? Nostalgia is a blessing and a curse, but I float on it's magic most days and sometimes it throws me into the pretty river to the future of what may come.

I get so damn tired when it goes too long without being somewhere or with someone where I feel like my truest self, naked from the different identities I try on like clothes of comfort. It should be discomfort, should it not? But it's true, I've become too comfortable being a blend of people tied together. I like to keep them guessing. It's too hard and I get afraid of people finding out exactly who I am - then they have the knowledge and power to hurt me. It's my power, my control, to hurt myself before anyone else can.

So, finding someone like you, who I am most undoubtedly the closest thing I've ever been to being who I think I am, is something like a balancing act. High up in the air just praying to dear God that this can stay somehow, that you aren't some mirage that will disappear in a moments time.

You are something I must've been searching for before I even knew. All those things I dreamed up when thinking about a way of living I could get down to. Everything I wanted before I knew you. You, this interesting and exciting miracle that took me by great surprise.
An electric shock that fuels me, charges me, when all the others seem to keep my battery running low. Is it strange to hear you are so vital to another persons thirst for life? I hope it's not too much, or that I am a weight that brings you down. I think maybe it's too hard to believe that there is something so good in who we are and what we do.

I think maybe it's like being told you're not supposed to meet your hero's. I think it's like ruining something good with the fear of something bad looming over to balance it all out. The negatives to the positives. Maybe it's scary cause it's hard to believe that I am lucky enough to find someone like you and be so easily and happily free for long. You, who goes about the world with an urgency to live despite the sheep who'll never understand or leave the farm like you can.

Someone who ignites the spark to flame like you can.

I want explore the world by your side, and do things with a fire in my soul,
like you can.

And all the ways that you can feed my flame when the embers are burning low,
I want to do the same and ignite your soul,
just like you can.

My international American Dream.