dear brendon [rydon]

3.2.14

3.2.14

dear brendon,

when we were fifteen, and we spent our time in the garage with spencer and brent, before brent left, you told me i was beautiful.

it was a saturday evening and brent and spencer had left to go get snacks from spencer's mom, and we were sitting on the kind of gross ripped up couch the smiths kept in their garage and talking about fall out boy and suddenly, in the middle of me ranting about patrick's vocals, your eyes got all soft and you said, "you're really beautiful, ryan."

and i blushed to a stop, stuttering the last word out of my voice. i didn't know what to say, because back then you were just the achingly pretty boy in our band and i wasn't sure i was gay yet, and i didn't know what the butterflies in my stomach i got when i saw you meant, and i didn't know why your eyes always seemed to captivate me, or why if you looked in my garbage can, you'd find tons of crumpled papers with broken up pieces of songs about brown haired boys with beautiful eyes. i didn't know i loved you then.

so i just smiled and said "thank you" in a small voice that sounded scared (because i was) and tried to pretend my cheeks weren't bright red and my soul wasn't exploding with a thousand emotions (who knew that happiness could come in a such a small package of four words strung together) and everything felt red in the best sort of way.

and then spencer and brent came back with cokes and brownies (we all loved mrs. smith's cooking) and there was laughter and beaming and good times and man, maybe the best of times were before we got famous. do you ever think that? that maybe we were better off as a nondescript garage band with no pressure of being famous, with brent laughing into spencer's shoulder and you stuffing your face with brownies and spencer giggling into his coke and me smiling at you all. maybe we were all happier like that.

i don't know. sometimes i wonder about all that. the what ifs, and what could have beens.

maybe it would have been better.

maybe it wouldn't have hurt this bad.