Cuidate (reimagined)

For years she’d listened to them--those who would have her believe that her way of loving was naïve and that her head was in the clouds. Those who warned that she would end up alone because of her unrealistic expectations. She listened and nodded quietly, but stubbornly refused to give up. She refused to come ‘round to more realistic ways of thinking. She often gave up, and regularly fell to utter despair, but she continued to carefully cultivate her dream.

Vindication comes in the strangest forms.

There was the night she sat blindfolded and tentatively touched him—learned the shapes, tastes, and textures with which she wanted to be so intimately familiar. She was a good girl. She didn’t even give it all away—didn’t let it all go. But she privately lived a thousand lives in the quiet moments of those few days.

She drank greedily from his well and filled up all of her spare reservoirs for the long days of drought that surely lay ahead. She languished at the source of the river, putting out of her mind the questions that could so quickly make her terror rise. She waited and gave and received and listened and spoke and loved and—God! Oh, God!—had never been so well-loved and probably never would again. In the quiet moments she found her voice: in those where he kissed her hands, brushed back her hair, or parted her legs. Those were everything that there had never been but that she’d always known existed.

How had people kept these things secrets? How had they never let on that it could be this way? All this time she had been taking care and biding her time when—really—she should have been running headlong into these moments. For it was these that made it all worthwhile; it was these that had begun to be impossible to imagine living without.