Feeling Intensely

Him.

The first time Elleora laid eyes on Izel, she was a complete mess. She had just cried her eyes out in a washroom stall and was making her way to her locker to grab her books for her next class. She was running down the stairs, strands of her hair falling loose from the French Braid she had spent the entire morning trying to get right.

She had reached the last flight when her current read slipped out of her fingers. It was when she bent down to recover it that she felt time slowing down. Her senses began to converge, her eyes widen, her mouth drying. She stood with the book pressed to her chest. Her arms hugging her body.

There, against the big glass window, stood a boy. He held a book in one hand. His other hand lightly hanging onto a pendant around his neck. His hair ruffled from hands constantly running through them. He bit his lower lip unceasingly as though awaiting something. His tortoise shelled spectacles falling shamelessly on the bridge of his nose.

A sharp, earsplitting ring yanked Elleora out of her trance. She wished to look at him longer. The bell jerked Izel out of his little book bubble too but he hadn't taken notice of her. He left before Elleora could completely snap out of it.

The first few days after Izel's enrollment, the corridors buzzed of him. Elleora learned of his name through the bees. She'd see him in the hallways either too engrossed in a book with his reading glasses on or just with his earphones plugged in with a little bob of his head every few seconds. 

She hoped to see him in school. It wasn't like Elleora to be so intensely involved in a guy she'd never spoken to. She found boys cute. But Izel was captivating. She convinced herself that she wanted nothing out of it. He was like a poem that she'd read over and over just to see how many different ways she could feel.

Was it the books he was always reading or the music he listened to or the way she had a feeling in this pit between her heart and her lungs that made him so fascinating.

Standing against her locker with a book in her hand, she'd glance at him as he walked by. His eyes would briefly look up every few seconds to make sure he was walking the right way. As his figure would walk into a huge mob of students and she'd lose sight of him, she'd sigh and go back to her book in the hope of another moment just like this one.