Every Waking Moment

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Playlist-

Go Flex - Post Malone, Atlas Hands -Benjamin Francis Leftwich

I was never supposed to love you.

You were somebody that was always just out of reach. First, it was because you were dating her. Then it was because I was dating him. But my heart was never in it, with him or anyone else, since the moment our eyes first met. We were in class, and you made me laugh. You were kind to me from the second you met me. I believed you were something I could always dream about but never have, and I was okay with that. But when I gazed into your bright blue ocean eyes, my soul ignited with something I had never felt before. I wanted to get on top of the tallest building in our dull paper town and yell; I wanted everyone to know that with our meeting came a fire within me, one I'd tucked away for so long and never thought could rise again. You made me feel like a child again, just by looking at me.

I ignored my feelings for you, because I knew I shouldn't have had them. I ignored them through the falling of the leaves, through the crisping of the air. When the breath of the earth started to nip at my insides, sucking the warmth from my body, all I had to do was look into your eyes and the inferno would lite, keeping me comfortable. Yet even through the unbearable winter months, where getting out of bed was a task in its own, I ignored the flame. I thought that maybe it would die out, maybe no one would know how I felt about you, the way I was supposed to be feeling toward the one I was saying "I love you" to. I ignored my feelings for you when the leaves came back, when the flowers started to blossom and life on earth returned to normal. I ignored it when the weather got warm and I ignored it when we got let out of school. June came around and I had ignored my feelings for you since September. Through all my problems and through all of the ones you told me about, I kept the front that we would only ever be friends because we were not meant to be anything more.

The burn of alcohol down my throat mimicked the warmth of your gaze, the burn of your touch. You were with me that night. There was a crowd of people, one of them Him, but all I could focus on was you. I stumbled through the house, laughing and drinking with people I barely knew. I drank a truth serum that gave way to the bonfire growing inside of me, one I had tried to put out for months on end. I couldn't hold back those wild flames any longer. I didn't live far and I was planning on walking home; I couldn't stay there. The Alcohol was coursing through my veins, and I knew with every step I was getting closer toward facing the fire.

But in that moment, when you kissed me surrounded by darkness, when I was only one glass of water away from being sober, it felt like a breath of summer air, sweeter than anything I had ever tasted. The feeling of your lips against mine was something that I had needed through all of those moments. I didn't know what this meant to you, if I was just another girl. But the way you kissed me, with the soft touch of your hands against the side of my face, made me wish that this wouldn't be it for us. I wished for this to last longer, for this moment to never leave me.

Between giggles and stolen glances our lips danced. The tempo felt familiar, the melody was like something that came from within me. I did not know the song that our lips were waltzing to but soon it spread through the capillaries in my skin, moving through my veins, releasing serotonin in my brain, changing the steady beat of my heart to the rhythm of a melody I had never heard but had known all my life. Soon, every cell within me knew the tune, and it seemed as though your body knew it too.

The morning was different: it was as if the sun brought sobriety, clarity to the situation. There were still parts of me singing the song I'd become so familiar with only hours ago. I hadn't slept but, somehow, I felt more awake than ever. My body was covered in the tracks left by your lips. They had left the steps to the dance on my skin like a map: a map that only you and I could ever read. You and I knew how it felt to dance to the burning melody. Only I knew of the fire tamed with the first touch of our skin, the first moment of our intimacy.