compendium

annabel lee

annabel lee
but we loved with a love that was more than love

William and I kissed once, because it was stupid and inevitable and meant nothing, and those cheap excuses of entertainment are what people pay for.

Of course, we would vehemently fight off anyone who suggested that we were more than just friends because we were a boy and a girl. We weren't. We were friends. I loved him, but I loved him with a different love than what you often see, and even when I loved him sometimes I didn't like him.

We were freshman in high school when we kissed - it was last year, actually. We left the football game early because we got bored and wanted to go watch movies at my house, and when we crossed underneath a shadowed corner outside the school he grabbed my waist and suddenly it was like inhaling the stars, the moon, the suns, the wispy clouds stretched one too many ways, nebulae and solar eclipses, and then it just felt wrong, and our lips felt like bullets and our tongues like chemical warfare, and we pulled back out of the trenches and flew the white flag.

We didn't talk about it. We never did. We buried it, on a day when it rained, and that was that. No Man's Land.

I kissed William only once more, on the day he grew too cold. It was chaste and barely a glance of warm against cold, a pulse against skeletal skin, and his skin still tingled on my lips when I burnt him, like they could feel the fire, too.

I was going to get back to him, one day. And it would probably be soon.