I will never truly know what it's like to be you, I suppose. There's a certain flicker in your eye that shows you are more than anyone else in this room: more alive, more enlightening, more human. You have a power beyond my imagination, a magic that lures people in without using money or fame or force. It's called charisma, I suppose, although I associate that word with slick salesmen and deceiving men of power. It sounds faked, fabricated. Wholly unlike you.
There is no way you could fake the way you smile: not like you've never seen sadness before, but like you knew it and defeated it, making it cry out for help as it perished under your ceaseless optimism. A lie has never left your mouth - for as much as you like to talk, you mean every word you say. There is nothing to you that isn't genuine. Not the songs, or the dances, or the witty, silly jokes. Not the wrestle matches and children's films, not the tears of insecurity that I know do come at night.
There is nothing deceiving about our friendship as it is, the deepest and most affectionate kind before crossing over to romance.
- and yet.
Yet, there is this churning in my stomach whenever you hold another boy so close, when you laugh with your mouth wide open at a remark I did not make. It's petty jealousy, I know, but sharing you hurts like hell. It turns me silent and shy, then boasting, impressing, anything to get your attention again. I'm a fraud next to you, never meaning it when I say that I don't mind, it's okay, of course you can invite them too. They're my friends, after all, are they not?
(They are not)
Not if what you are is friendship. Not if the thought of a friend should make you shudder inside, drive you mad with desire and kill you slowly every day.
Not when friendship entails letting sleep slide for memories of lips and hands lingering seconds too long, of whispered confessions and things left unsaid.
If you are a friend, they are mere acquaintances, strangers maybe.
To place them on the same level as you would be desecrating.
If you are a friend, they are definitely not.
Yet they are my friends, like they're supposed to be.
You are "nothing more", though, as you say.
Because to you, I am just like the rest, just a friend and nothing more, not a penny or a universe.
You only assumed I felt the same.
Why would you not?
I don't fault you.
You are not to blame.
And I wish my heart could keep up with the promises it makes at night. When once again I'm exhausted by your charms and pretty smiles, and determined not to fall again.
Only to wake up the next morning and fall down, like Alice into the rabbit hole.
Down,
down,
d
o
w
n
I fall, always deeper in love with you.
There's something I need to do.
Because my songs don't hit home and your arms still embrace whoever it is that is near. Your love knows no bounds, it's equal for all, I shouldn't want it to be all mine.
I should let you be free like you deserve to be, knowing your love for them won't diminish your love for me, that you've got so much to give you will never run out.
(Though that's hard to imagine when I myself can feel all the love inside me flying your way, into the black hole that devours it and could always use more more more, and I am always happy to give it. )
I have to remember that you aren't me, that we are opposites whose thoughts align, who attract without ever getting closer, who fit like a puzzle but form no picture.
We were meant to be, you and me, but not like in the songs.
It's what I tell myself when you're not near to prove me wrong.
Because the truth is, Miles: you are Midas. Your touch turns everything gold, making impossible to remember what inferiour colour it bore before you came around. Once you have laid your fingers on a dish, a book, a song, you are all that comes to my mind whenever I come across it again. Whatever my previous opinion was, it is erased now - glossed over by yours, a golden layer concealing everything underneath, sparing only the outline of what once was a fully independent device.
And somewhere, sometime, you must have touched me, too. Mid-embrace, your fingers must have brushed my skin, for I am golden now. I'm yours, Miles, frozen in time. My arms still hold your shape after you've left, and they won't cooperate with my mind. They do not oblige my requests, fail to function without the purpose you have given them now: forever to wait and remember.
And maybe,
hopefully,
to hold you again.
