kissing you was too hard

Kissing you was too hard.
It always fit the formula:
Take a risk, go out on a limb,
See the results; it’s always worth it.
But you finally being less than 87 miles away,
Finally starting to ease up and just love,
Finally feeling like it’s okay,
it finally felt like less of a risk to me.
Time tested and failed, but we still prevailed,
And so all I could think was, finally.

Kissing you never made this any easier,
Not that I thought of it as a solution.
But there was always some sort of comfort
In knowing that kissing was okay,
That I could feel what I felt,
And you could too.
All I wanted was for us to just be.
But we couldn’t do that.
We started the fire, we precipitated it all
With our shoulds and shouldn’ts and should haves.

But all I wanted was for it not to be so hard.
I was not interested in drowning again
in the plaguing questions of what your words counted for
when your actions or your body language didn’t match up
with the rhetoric you professed to me.
And now I wonder what was the gain
In risking my heart, putting myself on the line
When I am left with nothing but poems
with haunted memories seeded between the lines.

In the end, there’s “I should have” and “I shouldn’t have,”
But how could I have ever known
That the desire to learn to love you as Christ would have me do
Would lead me to a place without you.
And since this is where I stand,
Should and shouldn’t don’t matter anymore,
Which is more freedom than I ever knew I needed.