AM I IN LOVE WITH YOU OR AM I JUST LONELY?

five

Fuck. She looked so stunning today. She was prettier than an Arizona sunset. Her Spanish eyes locked with mine as she walked down the hall.

I wasn't in class, she always seemed to find me when I was doing wrong. She had a necklace draped around her shinning neck. Earrings hanging around her face. Her face was glowing and filled with waves. She spoke a language of romance. And she spoke so fast and so soft with the words stringing together and pouring from her mouth.

She had her braces removed and she smiled with her teeth more. I noticed her pearl teeth and it made me feel fuzzy inside.

I wish I could so lucky to be a person able to know her.

I wish she could kiss me. Really kiss me. Kiss me until my lips are swollen and chapped and I've forgotten what oxygen felt like flowing against my lips. I wish she would braid my hair even if it's sloppy and undone. I wish she would call me her princesa and bebita and amor. I wish she would talk to me with her faded accent and smooth voice.

But she raises her eyebrows when she sees me. Almost in a questioning way. And I remember the last time our souls barely touched. I was with him with a healing cheek.

She's probably wondering why I still let him kiss me. Why I stopped when I saw her. Why he punched me. Why I'm still with him. Why he still sleeps in my bed. Why I'm staying.

But she's smiling at me. Her sweet light giggle underlining the silence. Her hair showering down around her head and I wish I could brush my fingertips through the untangled strands. And I walked to the art exhibit the librarian had set up for the art students to showcase their work.

It was better than class. And she followed me silently into the library filled with hanging canvases and painted paper. Colors, paint, strokes, tears, smiles, fear, spit, and blood on the walls. There was a portrait of Claude Monet, done in shadows of yellow. It was beautiful.

I don't know much about art, but I know that the portrait made me feel different. He had these warm eyes but it felt like they were weeping, madly weeping. He had a look on his face I have never seen before. He was smiling but then he wasn't and it haunted me, not being able to know what he felt. He had a clean paintbrush in one hand and a cross clutched tightly in the other. I thought he was an atheist. He was barefoot. He was in the desert. If he looked like anything, he looked like death. All done in one of the happiest hues.

"You like it?" Her words were sweetened in her jaded accent, I think I gasped. She looked like the sky, ever changing, open, warm and soft. She gifted me with the sweetest eyes and matching smile.

"I don't know." I chewed on my lip. The painting burning into my brain. All the paint strokes etched into my eyes.

"I've always liked Monet. My mother used to have some copies of his paintings up in our living room, along with Frida Kahlo's, of course. I always thought they were very beautiful." She looks the painting. As she talks a portion of her hair breaking and falling onto her bronzed neck. I rip my eyes away from her bewitched beauty and to the painting.

"His paintings are very interesting." I try to say something. Anything. She blinks and nods her head, her hair swaying around her. Her long eyelashes pouring and falling.

A silence hangs between us. It's small and loose.

"You seem young." Her voice is so syrupy, I can almost taste it on the tip of my tongue.

"I'm not." I say. She smiles and crosses her arms. Her pink lips pulling together as she smirks. I can feel my hands become all clammy. A hiccup of a laugh escapes her throat, and all I see is the daydream of me and her kissing and on top of each other.