along the road

the feeling | 2014 | age 15

                        We talk forever; it soon begins to feel like time doesn't apply to us.

                   It's earth-shattering; the way I can speak to you and feel as though the world ceases its spinning to allow us a moment to gather our bearings, together. It's dizzying, to think that you're only a drive away, but I feel you; your breath fanning my face as you laugh, your gaze locked in mine, your hand hovering over mine—warily, because you're not sure. Nervously, because you've never held a boy's hand before.

             I still smile at that—I'm your first boy. I'll be forever emblazed upon the membranes of your heart, whether you wish it or woefully will for it to wash away. My name will burn across your mind whenever you hear it. My smile digs deeper into my face, forcing my eyes shut, as a glorious sound escapes me.

                      With every buzz of my phone, every awkward silence, every message I send to birthday girl (what do I say what do I say what do I say), I only feel closer to you, as if we're estranged lovers from another life, one celestial body ripped apart by the fabric of space and time. My heart glows, even in the dead of night, even when sunlight is scattered across the earth like fresh seeds, when I think of you.

               Something amorous and swollen has lodged itself within me, between my ribcage and my lung, and it beats and throbs like a second heart. On occasion, it tickles my chest, and once your name flashes within my fingertips, in the dents of my palm, against the hardwood table, atop my thighs—which touch, beautifully, lovingly—it grows and breathes and whispers the refrain that swam through me that night.

         Here he is. Here is my dream.

                I never wonder if you're thinking the same thing; if the same colours swarm across your heart when I cross your mind, if your fingers tingle as you attempt to reply, if you find yourself seeing me in the corner of your eye, if you feel me in the soil of your soul. I simply enjoy the feeling of what could be—if given enough time, enough effort, enough you and me and me and you—love.

☀

                   The drought sweeps us both off of our feet.

       I disappear, as I tend to do—within myself, without myself, beside myself, next time, myself-but I still hear your voice. You disappear, too, the kind of vanishing that I watch happen, a waning disinterest, the natural succumbing of men to their primal state, one they—you, you—do not bother to fight when they so furiously can. My phone lights up with your name as I drift to sleep, my words bleed onto the screen while the sun hangs in the sky like a ball waiting to drop. It's still the honeymoon phase, but colder—where we explore opposite ends of the same city, where I only see you when the lights are out, where I begin to only feel that second heart writhing like a new-born in the pit of my stomach. It was almost as if you clung to sight; to the purely tangible, to the immediately available.

             However, I have always been a man of the things imagined-the perceived feel of your hands wrapped in mine, the cultivated mirth in your voice as you listen to me ramble about things that I often keep close.

                 We are the same age, but you are the man who has grown blind, and I am the boy who never needed eyes to see.

                      That is when it happens, I think. That the world turns hazy, that time begins to tick at its usual pace, that the heart hints at its failure, sputters of doubt and neglect creeping through the tears in those strained fibres.

           The sudden blimp roaring across the glass screen. The little ping, the status update, the presence of a relationship that I'd been blissfully aware of.

            Until now.

             Do you want to know what it said to me? That blue heart, with your name and hers on either end of it?

                 He is in love. The screen whispered. Venomously or motherly, I could not decide. And it is not with you.

                    You try to curve around it; lead me down back stairways, through trapdoors, hiding behind hidden rooms and boarded-up windows. You try to say that it's nothing—that her heart does not weigh on you, that her kiss isn't tattooed across your chapped lips, that your hands have not merged and become one, the bones there all too familiarized to those of their significant other, the skin understanding the presence of a lover.

                  I do not know what to say; caught between waves of nothing or whispers of I understand, a cacophonous echo of no no no or a silent, unassuming goodbye. I wish I was stronger, then, when your eyes still looked like the blues of swimming pools that my mother gawked at in the magazines she bought to make us feel better—look better, sound better, seem more in sync with the world than we really are. We're far apart from the outside; I hadn't had a sip of alcohol in my life, and she only went out once a month. We see our corner of the world, and I imagine the rest.

                   That's why I wonder if my confusion is simply that; the growing pains of adjusting into this new thing, this situation where a boy says he likes me—he really really likes me—but finds it more suitable to whisper those words into the ears of another, thinks it's more appealing to caress the breasts of a girl I can never be.

                  Some part of me is still frighteningly sure, however; this is not how love (almost love, barely-there love, we could have made it, love) works. And I will not, shall not, trick myself into believing that your second-hand love will ever find a way to revive the heart that has died within me.

☀

Situation number two.

When I found out, I was reeling. I was in complete and utter shock. Like, is this actually happening? Is the one boy who finally reciprocated, finally felt like something real-someone real-going to screw me over like this? And then, cold-hard reality whispered, "Yes, it is. Yes, he will." He had no obligation to me (no promise of forever, or anything like that), but trust me when I say that it hurt. Something rammed into my chest and never found its way out.

Today, I pulled the last piece of disappointment out of my heart.

Thank you for reading. I love you.

Dedicated to aaro, my baby moonbeam.

-jay.