Love Letter to New Mexico

My Darling Land of Enchantment,
 
You may be the only lover I’ll ever need. You get me. You fathom my unending quench for the sublime, for splendor, for the sensual nature of earth meeting heaven, and place me smack in the middle.
 
I never tire gazing on your immaculate beauty. The sky, reaching beyond my vision, the deepest azure that feels like the ocean has taken residence upside-down. Burnt soil rolling for miles, from cowboy kicked brown to brick red, punctuated by the verdant Juniper dotting your hills and lowlands. I love that you inhabit various forms over different miles, that your crags can become ebony as night followed by fields of sand as milky as the sun’s palest rays. You are a multitude of lands crisscrossing into one, much as I embody many women.
 
There is a quality of tranquility here that I have never felt anywhere else. The solid sense in my heart that I have arrived home. Whenever I leave, I think of you like I would a swain left behind, and when I return, my eyes can’t drink you in fast enough. I feel giddy at the approach, recognizing the outline of the mountains, scorched sand, sweeping plains, and the tumid clouds, low hanging and longing to be touched. You own me in a way that no one ever will.
 
I admire that you are wild, open, and free. Unconquered. Untouched. That some of the best parts of you are left for you and you alone. Mostly, you sit in passive grace, but I love that there is an element of danger to everything you touch, despite your allure. Anything could be extreme, and in a moment, you may change your mind to engage the world through furious rain, or blistering sun. You tame my own ferocity, but you also respect when it needs unleashed, and I feel safe in my skin with my feet touching your ground.
 
I know you like I know my own body, the curves and valleys, the peaks and rises. Driving across your unending vistas, dipping down and up, the sun steaming your surface, is pure sensuality, as if my hands were rolling across the surface, soaring when you ascend, sinking when you fall. It takes my breath away, and it only leaves me wanting more.
 
If I could love you any more, I would become a part of you, melting into your skin, evaporating into your scarce bodies of water, softening to become another outcrop. I would evanesce into the breeze, carried by the zephyrs you exhale as your moist, sacred breath. Perhaps when I have perished, my body licked by flames, it will join your own, scattered as sooty ash across the places I love best. My soul will meld into your own: wandering, unbound, and feral. And in that moment, I will taste my one true love, and finally know her kiss.