Just looking into her eyes felt like waking up for the first time, the kind of waking where light doesn’t just touch your skin, it moves through you. Like morning sun slipping between your lashes. Like birds singing just before the silence of dawn. A stillness that meant everything was about to begin.
From that day forward, Anna and I began to unravel each other slowly, like string loosening from the tightness of its spool. Nothing rushed, but everything inevitable.
At school, people whispered. Our closeness didn't go unnoticed. The way we laughed together, how our eyes found each other even in crowded hallways, they talked. Of course they did. Our town wasn’t built for girls like us. The world still isn’t.
But their noise never made it past the glass walls we built around ourselves.
She taught me things, not by trying, but just by being.
That life could be contradictory and beautiful in the same breath. That you could keep your mess in plain sight and still be worth loving. That laughter at 2 over bad comedy shows was a kind of therapy. That sitting quietly during car rides, watching the world blur by, could be more intimate than words.
I used to wonder why she chose me. Why she let me in?
She’d look at me with those storm-soft eyes, smirk gently, and say,
“Because you’re mine.”
And I believed her.
Funny, how those words with anyone else wouldused to sound like a collar. A thing people said to possess. A thing I used to flinch at.
But from her lips, it wasn’t ownership. It was home.
Being hers didn’t mean I was small, it meant I was held.
It meant I was seen.
It meant I had a place in someone’s chest where the world could not reach me.
We belonged to each other, not as property, but as poetry.
And that mattered more than anything else.
