Insomniac

Sam

slightly edited...kinda

☽s.13☾

The sky had been changing. From deep indigo, then to blue and now it was at the stage of pale blue that was so pale blue it was almost gray, it was almost white, it was almost nothing. It was the stage right before the entire horizontal expanse of sky caught afire with the prospect of a new day. This was the stage I liked the most. Because it was like I didn't know how it became nothing, and once the sky changed again I didn't know how it got there from the previous pale nothing. Watching the sunset or sunrise was weird. It was like time went super slow, like it was stretched out-like when you pulled gum from in between your teeth and it stretched out into gooey strings and strands-yet at the same time it was so fast you could blink and it'd all be over and you didn't even know how it happened.

I snuck a glance at Michael wondering if he could feel my eyes on him when I looked trying to be all clandestine, covert in the way I looked, the way I stole glances at him-because when a boy looked so delicious and he was just right there to look at whenever you wanted, you sorta felt like you were stealing. Michael was bathed in the pale early morning light and I think it looked good on him. There weren't many things that wouldn't look good on him. He was just... good. We were outside of the diner sitting all smashed together on the stoop of Sugar's and I was finding it harder and harder to focus on one thing. I couldn't choose-both were so appealing, everything around me was appealing but so was Michael. In front of me the sky was making its daily transition from pastel pale blue nothing to gold. Around us was fog, the fog that was lifting and shrouding us in its depths. Around me was also the fresh five in the morning air that was laced with that revived serene early morning quality. The air that was so fresh it felt as if when I breathed it in the oxygen molecules were just about bursting in my lungs. Next to me was Michael, all of him. His strong warm thigh pressed right up against mine so that I could feel the heat through our clothes, eradicating the morning chill. His arm, it was flush with mine and his shoulder was underneath my ear-besides when I looked at him. I took another sec to set my gaze on him. The waxing sunlight was playing tricks on his skin setting his cool ocean blue eyes afire along with the rest of the sky, it softened the sharp edges of his face like his aristocratic nose that had the perfect slope and point, and his jaw that was jagged and angular-the jaw that I liked a lot. I have to admit I had something about jaws. Secretly I wanted a man with a jawline stronger than my own Wi-Fi connection, stronger than the Wi-Fi connection when you were standing smack dab in the middle of the Apple Store (Michael had that jaw).

He was holding my hand. He was more relaxed now in his hold on me, but when we first sat down he seemed tense. He seemed tense a lot tonight-or well this morning. I had asked him what was the matter, but I didn't want to push him like the last time. The last time we were in the diner I made a complete spectacle of myself, really I did. I was pretty much daring him to tell me he wanted me. And he didn't respond the way I wanted him to. So I'd resigned to being his friend, because he needed a friend and I wanted to be his friend. Pathetically enough I wanted as much of him as I could get. We just fit well together I thought. We were good together. Better together. I felt more alive than ever, ironically at three in the morning with him.

Thinking about it, if he didn't look so down when the other night I probably would have been mad at him. Mad at him for kinda leading me on, or making me feel the way he did anyway (and lately he'd been making me feel crazy). Along with mad probably I would have felt mortified and stuff, but I just couldn't bring myself to be mad at him as he walked away looking like a sad lonely lost puppy. I also couldn't bring myself to be mad at him or even really irritated when I found him in the record store all drunk and messed up about that bullshit letter. I just felt this need to be there for him, to validate his feelings and remind him of how people had different talents and "so what you aren't passing that class Mike? It's not like that class composes your entirety as a person". I wanted to be there for him because honestly he was there for me too. I didn't tell him-mostly because I didn't want to bog him down with my problems, annexing them to his, and partly because I felt like my problems weren't nearly as big and imposing as his-the ones he'd shown me and the ones that were looming under the surface. I hadn't told him, but he helped me out a lot too. He was there for me, he was the one thing that was constant, in my life that had so recently taken a huge new terrifying change (maybe that's why I could hardly bare it when he left. That and the fact that it was nicer to fantasize about kissing him when he was right in front of me. Then I could appease myself by saying that I could just lean over and kiss him if I really wanted. Not that I had the guts, but that's what I told myself. When he was far away doing God knows what God knows where-somewhere not next to me-I was stuck fantasizing about him and knowing that he was too far away for me to try out my rusty French-kissing skills on him if I wanted).