I live wondering if I am as complicated as I think or if everything is self-imposed suffering. I want to think that I am pretending. Maybe I want to hope that I am pretending because it means that I'm not as broken as I feel. Would it make me broken to want to pretend?
I open my eyes, all too aware of the cold in my bones and the ache of my joints. I am still outside, right where I'd lain down with him to just talk. I hadn't just spoken with someone in so long that it was like some sort of dream, that conversation. The only thing reminding me it was real was the hint of his smell - all smoke and burning grass - and the gentle lay of the grass. His imprint still there as though the grass itself felt blessed to have touched and been touched by him.
"What do you want- from life I mean?"
he looked me in the eye, sure as always. always seeming to know everything although he hadn't known me for more than a month.
"I don't know. I never have. I don't have a drive..urge...I'm pathetic."
The silence stretched, broken by the small intake of my breath, the whisper that would be heard no matter how quiet I was.
"It scares me."
That is the last thing I remember before he laid down, stared at the sky without saying anything else to me - like I had never spoken. I don't know if I'm mad at him or simply thankful that he had only listened, like he'd promised those odd number of weeks ago when he stepped in front of me and demanded my company.
"What's your name?"
"M-my name?"
"Yes, you. If I'm going to sit down and listen to you and have you listen to me like friends do, I have to have a name to call you by."
"Since when were we friends?"
"Since now, since I said so."
Standing, I allowed myself the time to stretch and unstick my dew-damp clothes from my body - only slightly cringing at the sensation it left behind. Looking left and right, I had only just grasped that I was completely alone. That he'd left like some vigilante in the middle of the night or maybe some sort of apparition I'd invented out of my own loneliness. The pit that formed in my stomach was unwelcome as I picked up my life-beaten sneakers and prepared for the walk home and the inevitable questioning about my sudden disappearance in the late hours of the evening only to return in the wee hours of the morning like some rebel teen. That was how he made me feel though, like a rebellious girl bending at the beck and call of her bad boy. Except he wasn't bad. He was good. Too good for me and almost everyone else. Too good for the world, he seemed.
"why do you bother with me?"
"you're a good person."
Some part of me wonders if you know what you do to me, this complicated-but-maybe-not- girl. And then I look at the light of your smile, the grace of your eyebrows and I realize you don't know that you're made of stardust to me.
It takes only 6 hours that day for me to see him again. He looks the same, yet different. He does not look like the boy that sat next to me and formed moonlight with his very existence, no. This time he looks like the sun, maybe just a bit brighter and more dangerous. Our eyes lock across the room and he waves with a twitch of his fingers, mouth smiling and nose scrunching just a bit in that way it seemed only I noticed. I smile back, ignoring the lava in my veins and the edge of longing engraved deep behind my eyes. I did not make my way to him, not yet. I wanted to enjoy him from a distance for just a bit more.
"I don't ever want to grow up."
"Why?"
"Because it means that this moment will be destined for nostalgia and not something that is forever."
It was then I realized I could not have him. I could not have this perfect boy and his moon-sunlight smile, his starry eyes and bluish-purple bruised soul with all it's colors of twilight. I could not have him the way I wanted. I realized it like some people realize they're adults now when they graduate college or like some say they realized that someone close would never be close again. It hit like a heavyweight punch but I could not bring myself to fall, not in agony. I could only see the indent of laugh lines when he grinned, the bitterness of his tears when he cried and fall deeper into the love he did not want from me. I fell more, knowing that he was metaphorically forbidden. That I could never be able to love him like someone else would someday.
"tell me something interesting."
"If you love a flower, don't pick it up. Because if you pick it up, it dies and ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be."
"Who's that from?"
"Osho."
"Hm. Interesting."
He finds his someone one day, I can see it before he tells me. Can tell by how his eyes dart around and then rest, only to flash back to me again in hopes I had not caught him. I always did, but I pretended not to notice that he probably hadn't heard the last ten things I said.
"What is it like to fall in love?"
"How would I know?"
"Because you're in it already."
She is everything I expected, everything I selfishly wanted her not to be. She is a universe of her own, a galaxy fit for him. I can tell that she sees all the things I do, all the things that made me fall in love with him and stay in love with him quietly. All the things that reminded me that he could only ever be hurt by me. I want to hate her, but I can't. She's too perfect, too much like him. I can see why he fell. It is also why I am surprised, but not hurt, when he takes me to the spot I now hold dear to talk to me for the last time.
"I can't hang out with you as much anymore."
"I understand."
But I didn't. Not really. I was nothing more than a friend to him, a star among the millions in his constellation - nothing like the universe he had. I would never be her, he would never shine for me like he did for her - no matter how many late night, early morning - disappearing with the wind conversations we had. Whatever it was that we had was as regular as an orbit to him. I was a star that wished to be a planet because, like all things that die too soon, I wanted to be what was eternal. But I was not immortal. I was a small star, the kind that shone dimly and was usually overlooked. The kind that died out the quickest in a brilliant burst of light.
So as I watched him walk past me, glancing in my direction and sending that smile I had once kept to myself, I smiled back. Still loved him from a distance as he loved someone else who was intimidated by me, sure, but still did not have it in her to be mean to me. Have him cut me off completely. I smiled back against the pain that I let them both impart on me. I smiled back and wondered why I couldn't rip him from my existence. And then his smile widened before he turned, happy I was truly not angry at him like I said I wasn't over and over and over until he finally left me alone that night. I hadn't lied, I couldn't be angry at him. He had that power over me; I loved him that much. I would probably lay the world at his feet if he asked.
But he was not mine, would never be, and I could not be angry because I had made it that way.
"How quickly do you think a person can fall in love?"
"So fast they think they're somewhat crazy, so fast they think it isn't real."
"Is that from experience?"
"Something like that- sure."
