You and I are building a loving relationship as if we are collaborating on a piece of art together.

We commune. I looked it up. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, when ‘commune’ is used as a verb, it means “to get very close to someone or something by exchanging feelings or thoughts.”

We collaborate and commune together.

I did not tell my biological father that I am in love with you. He could just tell. How do I know this? Well, following our dinner yesterday, he wrote a haiku, which he shared with me today. Here it is:

my daughter's in love.

I'm happy for her full heart

unafraid of pain

Baby, my heart is full. It swells when I think about being with you. My love spills out of my eyes and drips off my voice when I mention you. The trees know. The flowers know. The birds know. The people know.

And I am not afraid of pain. Or, rather, even if I am, I shove that fear aside because I know that we cannot have what we have without the risk of pain (intense pain). Love and pain go hand in hand. You also know this. You know that you can’t have one without the risk of the other.

The truth is that for the duration of most of the years I’ve been alive, I have longed for your lips against my lips. I have longed for your lips on my body.

For as long as I’ve known how to kiss, I have longed for lips, your lips, to kiss me on my heart and on my brain.

You know exactly how to kiss me, where to kiss me, and when. And then you go back and kiss any place you may have missed.

When you kiss me, it travels to a place that sends messages to my fingers and toes, and then onward to a place that feels something like home.

When you kiss me, music plays out of nowhere on its own. How could I ever have settled for anything less than your lips?

When you kiss me, you are speaking sense into the world. You are the Good defining itself.