because i wanted you to know

06

I never wanted to go to that stupid party to begin with. Social situations have always been a weakness of mine, something I was very insecure about. I had been completely and totally set on the idea of ringing in the new year in the comfort of my living room, my best friend and I the only ones to entertain each other, clinking glasses of champagne and giggling at how grown up we'd felt.

I don't know why I so easily said yes when we were invited to join so many others that night, but I did. I instantly agreed to go and party in someone's basement and share the couch with ten other people, to dance to trashy music and drink sparkling grape juice and wear plastic party hats, to take blurry snapchat pictures with people I half knew and zone out intently when they started to gossip about the same girl they always did when they got together.

I really cannot remember why I said yes when I knew I didn't want to go, but I did.

I had no idea you would show up halfway through the night at the same party.

As soon as you came, I migrated over to where you sat checking your phone repetitively and nervously brushing your hair back the same way I remember Leonardo DiCaprio did ever so often in the Great Gatsby movie, and almost every other film he had played in.

I think sometimes I resonate with J. Gatsby, doing all that's in my power to gain your affection, and maybe in this case you'd be Daisy Buchanan, wooed for a moment, but not wooed enough.

I didn't know if you were checking your phone because the time wasn't going by fast enough, and you couldn't wait to leave, or if you were checking your phone because you still hadn't heard from her, and she'd promised you would.

You'd brought alcohol in a green tea bottle, which we had to keep quiet about as we passed it back in forth between one another. I lied beside you, and my friend lied beside me, but for a minute, it felt like it was just the two of us talking.

And I felt so warm inside, for I had never spent time with you so carefree and so casually. I felt like we could be friends, real friends, and I treasured every word you said that night the same way I treasured you once before.

We talked about everything and nothing. I was giggly and I still don't know if it was from the alcohol I had been sipping on or if it was just you.

At one point I laughed so hard I almost cried because you said, "Look at the stars," as we were staring at a plain white ceiling. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and I imagined what it'd feel like if we really were looking at the stars, lying so close together our bodies were touching.

Maybe that's when I knew. It was you, it had always been you and it would, until I took my very last breath on this earth, be you. I heard it in your laugh, in the way your whisper sounded so close to my ear, in the sound the carpet made as I inched closer to you, in the way that, when we counted off the ball dropping and finally got to 1, I kissed everyone in that goddamn room and my head screamed, over and over, "Kiss him! Kiss him!" and my heart dropped down to my stomach because I knew that I couldn't and that maybe I never would.

I felt it when I draped my arm around you as you read over her text. I heard it in your voice as you said "Wait, wait," when I hugged you and hugged you again.

In the pictures we took that are now lost in undeveloped film, as if they never happened at all, in the way I brushed against your shoulder and looked at you with sad eyes every time you spoke directly to me, in the way we taunted each other like we were good pals getting together for the first time in a long time, I felt it. It was you.

And though I felt it so strongly and so deeply it overpowered any other emotion that may have been inside of me, I swallowed the thought.

I told myself "He's a good friend." I told myself, "He's cool to hangout with." I told myself, "'I can handle being around him."

Then you offered to take us home.