her name is natalie and we’re fifteen and shivering with the curtains closed when she kisses me in the way i used to steal my sister’s makeup, tucked up my sleeve, ashamed even in the shadows. our hands are shaking and i wonder if songbirds can feel our binoculars on them, i wonder if that’s why i never liked the whole birdwatching thing. the next day our fingers brush in an empty hallway. her name means something about christmas day which i tell her on a night when my heart does backflips every time she looks at me.
we don’t end up together because teenagers are here to experiment, because these are the free trial years, practice for the real thing, and don’t girls always do these things for attention. when she looks at me i feel galaxies. i guess that’s just something that goes away with age.
her name is annie and we are restless and twitching outside a party when she puts her firecracker hands on me. she looks the way sunlight tastes and we kiss like we’re trying to get our names in history for causing the loudest heartbeats. i only know warmth where our bodies meet and we find love somewhere between this wildfire and her crumpled sheets. the next day she wakes up crying and we sit there with our toes touching not looking at each other until her boyfriend calls.
see we don’t end up together because young girls do this kind of thing, freedom until graduation, not really into labels, because sooner or later, she’ll fall back in love with men and disappear out from between my sheets. the world starts and ends on her lips but don’t i know it’ll all be gone in the morning.
her name is sarah and i think god signed his name somewhere in her freckles and she asks me what i think love is so i tell her about the night sky and how it loves the north so much that it dances over the arctic every time it snows. we are grown up and quiet and in love and when we kiss our teeth clack together because we are both smiling. it’s a saturday and our legs intertwine like branches when she tells me how if love ended, we’d go down fighting.
we won’t end up together because this is the tipping point, where the cliche becomes the trope, where our bodies have tangled long enough and now the audience is tired of watching. this is where she’ll fade from under my fingertips or go back to loving men or just pack her bags silently one morning while i make us coffee. this is where if we make it through, cling to each other longer than they thought we would, we’ll be reminded how one of us always dies at the end.
see we won’t end up together because this is the wrong kind of love. she is songbird and firecracker and the northern lights, she is gift wrap and galaxy and every good thing, but don’t we know that we don’t get a happy ending. don’t we know that no girl ever ends up with her girlfriend. oh, don’t we know we were never meant to have a happy love, don’t we know you can’t rewrite an ending already decided and this love was written a tragedy.
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