Love without Insulation

By Melissa Sussens

My love, you are a chemist, 

notice each elemental change in me. 

With you, I do not feel like too much. 

You do not tell me to stop overreacting 

when my emotions are leaving me shaky and pacing. 

You reply to each text, fall asleep pulling me 

closer every night, gathering up each part of me 

and holding them in your accepting embrace. 

You say you want to spend your life with me, 

have a ring board on Pinterest. 

I want to believe in this storybook love again. 

For two years I learnt to love my lonely 

after her voice, 1300km away, 

was the cold messenger 

of betrayal with the words 

we can still be friends. 

I did not believe I could exhale 

into a space of comfort again. 

Sometimes I am still holding my breath. 

Afraid to name any kind of happily-ever-after. 

Afraid to love without any insulation 

around the beat of me. 

Perhaps a part of me is still trapped, 

phone pressed to my ear, as the future 

I’d held onto is revealed imaginary. 

I want instead to imagine a better future, 

to create a ring board of my own. 

We have the house and the dogs, 

but I want to believe in everything else with you, too. 

The garden we work in together on a Sunday afternoon, 

the kitchen filled with smells of your sourdough baking, 

our bedroom, duck egg and grey, linen we picked out together. 

I want joint holidays. Christmases split between your family and mine. 

I want to tumble into the cold with a dog at 4am 

only to heat myself back up against your exothermic skin. 

I want to stop waiting for the end, 

instead call my future 

by your name, over and over 

and over again.

---

Melissa Sussens (she/her) is a queer veterinarian and poet. Her work has appeared in Capsule Stories, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Germ Magazine, among others. She was runner up for the New Contrast National Poetry Prize and lives in Cape Town with her fiancé and their two dogs. Find her on Instagram @melissasussens.