My hand was clutching impatiently at the hem of your skirt. Your aroma is taunting. Toasted sugar and lavender dancing around like mist... There is a twitch in my lips, and I am too excited to be bothered with shielding it from you as you are just a...
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Lone, lone lone You love me, love me
- Beltway, Solange
"Talk to me." You're gathering my face again.
Fingers brush past my cheek to get to the back of head, cradling me still. Your eyes have soften while shifting between mine and your fingers tap against my neck. I dare to look at your face knowing it will haunt me later.
I allow my breath to shake the silence in the air....I tell him all the reasons I hated school as a kid. I tell him how -before Lizzy- I did my best being alone. I spoke about my parents working long hours to avoid each other with my voice trembling, describing the racist taunts from kids at school and the loneliness like a dull knife that lazily pokes the same wound.
Yet, staring into your eyes knocks that dull knife from past's hand only to be replaced by something sharper, rushing in like wind. They dig deeper to find the hottest, most tender spot inside me while I take deep breaths under that piercing gaze.
" One day after school, I think I seen you walking towards Semonova Reservoir- the forest with the steep loop trail. No one was supposed to walk through there but you did, and it happened every day after that. Yes...Definitely, it was you."
..."I looked forward to it as we would walk the same way until splitting up a block from it. You were always ahead of me, but we were walking together. Sort of. " Even then, you looked so strong...Unshakable. You're tracing and pressing gently into the grooves of my palms.
"I think you were dreading something, and at one point you started walking slower after school... That's when I began to draw you," You slid your hands to cover my trembling ones," In my notebooks, sketchbooks, sticky notes- each one... you'd have a deep frown and I would submerge you entirely in a blue shadow. It felt like I had to put you there. It was so sad I'd...I'd start fucking crying. My mom never understood why and I couldn't explain it as a kid. "
Somehow, my mom kept those drawings over the years. Before moving all her things to a storage unit, I found those childish drawings in a small box that opened specific emotions I had locked away.
From just looking at those drawings, his brokenness would fall into my heart in pieces. It hurt even more to see the hurt in Jacob's face in reality and do nothing. My little eyes and mouth filled with wet guilt, drowning all the joy I had as a child. Even now, the image of his younger self cuts all my thoughts in its cold agony.
I can't ignore it. I was never good at doing that- Not for you. Even when I somehow made myself forget, your sadness still lingered and tainted everything for years. I can never decipher if what I'm feeling is yours or mine.
Feeling exposed, I turn my attention towards a crowd of orchids in the distance, their purity cloaked and facing me as I continued.
"The day before Valentine's day, I followed you into Semonova. Have no idea how you didn't see me but we went so deep that I didn't recognise it at all- as far as my six-year-old self could memorise. I remember being curious then panicking but still willing to follow you until you stopped near this tall and mossy tree-
