Safety, Love and Infinity

An unconventional love letter

What is safety?

Safety from the howling and screaming, from the blinding lights and the pitch-black everywhere. Thick, suffocating smoke, dark like the most light-starved depths of the abyssal ocean. Safety from insanity. Safety from scratching nails on blackboards as long as oceans and as dark as nightmares. Safety from a night that never ends, a day that never comes. Safety from chaos, from the end of structure, from cruel noise, from the deafening wind, from the dark and the leering eyes in the shadow, from teeth and holes and dancing shades in the corners, behind every back, along the walls and the ceiling.

Safety from the infinite in the darkness behind my eyelids, infinities in the fabric of reality—a twisting seam tying and untying itself back and forth, undulating in eternity. Safety from the infinite manifolds of realities splayed across the sky like stars and galaxies.

The world marches forward endlessly.

Light flashes to darkness and reality collapses and reconstructs itself. Scenes of life play out like film and fade to black. The structure of language itself quavers, trembles, and buckles under the weight of the infinite. A million lights flicker out of existence as galaxies of possibilities explode in a terrible brilliance.

But then, I look into your eyes and glimpse a wonder that words cannot describe, a radiance all the wavelengths of light in our universe can’t outshine, a harmony a million Mozarts could never compose. Like a diamond in the riverbed amongst rocks and pebbles and more grains of sand than there exist numbers to count them.

Here, there is safety.

Safety in repetition, in old music. Safety in soothing calm, like soft dew and morning mist, like a mother’s caress on newborn cheeks. Safety in the carefree breeze brushing by hammocks and picnics, in grasses greener and swaying in the autumn light. Safety in holding hands, in the sharing of love, in the quiet celebration of life. Safety in the fireplace that keeps warmth through the night. Safety in the door that guards tender hearts from the cruel, callous wolves straying outside.

Safety in the flame we kindle together, the amber light that pushes back against the overwhelming black. Safety in reunion. Safety in the twinkling of hearts meeting and staying close through changing seasons. Safety in continuity; safety in friendship and family and the bonds of life.

Safety in our little corner of infinity.

Us, like a single speck of dust borne by a ceaseless wind, a leaf caught in a hurricane, a twig in a tree that stretches infinitely in all directions. Like a single dot poked into a paper that stretches across every conception of reality ever formed.

Safety in your hands and mine, together against all odds, defying all the cruel numbers of life.

This—this love—is safety.