Astrology & Other Drugs

Ocean

Let me tell you a story about a boy who chased after a girl for a whole year, and when the tiger finally caught the deer he took one bite and decided he liked zebra more.

I was fifteen and young and innocent and my lips had yet to taste the poison that lingers inside of broken boys. He tainted my favorite place, and I will never be able to escape him. I go to it every year; it's my family's traditional local vacation spot.

So I was young and fifteen and innocent and he was young and fifteen and had experienced the world in ways that I still haven't because the pain he left inside of me turned to ice that I don't know how to melt.

We spent a week together and he kissed me in ways that should not exist in this world. But he liked games and I did not know the rules, and when it came down to the two of us, I was not the last one standing.

I remember everything about him. Blonde hair, blue eyes, tanned skin, the way he towered over me and how he wrapped his arms around me. I remember his lips - so soft and addicting, an elysium I tried my hardest to cling to.

I remember the back of him, how it felt watching him walk away, how he hated beer but loved fishing and had an uncanniness to outshine the stars.

I remember what it's like, standing in the ocean, waiting and waiting, knowing and feeling it within myself, a crushing weight bearing down on my chest, knowing that he wasn't coming.

I remember trying to hold onto something that wasn't there and losing my pain in another boy who was everything he wasn't and nothing I wanted.

It's been more than a year, and he still appears in my dreams because he was my first love. And it sucked, because we were friends before all of this, and I knew the longing stares would eventually lead to what happened, but I expected for him to want me, not to leave me in the ocean with the stars as my only companion.

The next year when I went back, it was two in the morning and I was with a boy four years older than I was, and as he moaned my name and kissed me like I was oxygen and he was drowning, you were the only one on my mind.