the month of december (bxb)

and remember why we fell in love

she, dodie
17TH OCTOBER, 2012
FIFTEEN YEARS

It was one am. I'd snuck into his room through the window, as I always did, to save myself from the confrontation of his parents scolding gaze. I only knew he was awake by the light in his room being on, and his shadow—wild curls, rounded glasses and languid posture—visible through the half cracked curtains. This was a usual occurrence, however: me climbing through his window, him sitting in silence, his parents fast asleep. Seth was an only child, and he hated the dark. His parents weren't heartless, but not attentive either, so he relied on me to keep him company.

And for Seth, I delivered.

We never said much, though. It was rather the pair of us under his sheets, our adolescent hands itching to hold one another but refraining. Out of fear? Wonder? Excitement? I never knew with Seth. He was an art piece, shrouded in mystery and painted in colours of neon pink and green. And when he was next to me, he never smiled as he did when he used to go to school. Each smile was rarer than the last when he did, so rare that I'd even begun to tally them up in my journal. I think he knew, because he began to smile significantly less as the months flew by, to the point that I forgot what his smiles looked like.

"Hey, Ainsley?" His voice intercepted the silence of the room around us—a shout with the look of a whisper.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."

I looked towards him. He wasn't staring at me, eyes firmly glued to the ceiling above us—to the constellations that he'd painted on it when he was fourteen. Time flew quickly, back then. "For what?" I asked, staring intently at him. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed the way his nose rounded at the tip, or how his eyes looked more dark from his side profile than from the front. Nor was it the first time I'd noticed the way his curls followed the pattern of his ear, hugging each crevice that dented them. It wasn't the first time, neither was it the last. It was simply one of several.

"Everything." He scoffed and laughed at the same time—a strangely addictive sound. "You ...You keep on coming back to me, even when I push you away. You're just there when I need you, you know?" He looked at me then, eyes now bright despite the absence of the sun. "You know?"

I nodded. "I know." That was a lie. I didn't know.

A soft smile—the first, I think, in months. "Good. It's good that you know." He exhaled heavily, wrapping a finger around the curls of his hair, and then shifted his body to be parallel to my own. "One day, I'm going to draw you."

I raised my brows. "You once told me that you only draw pretty things."

"Do you not think you're something pretty?"

My mouth opened, but no words left them. I wasn't expecting a conversation so profound. With Seth, I never expected such a thing. "I never thought of it, if I'm being honest."

"Well," he began, reaching his hand toward the side of my cheek. He stroked it then, soft fingers over faint stubble. Air skimming the tips of pointed grass. "I think you are. I always have thought you were."

"Really now?"

He cracked another smile—this one larger than the last. "You think I'm joking, Ainsley?"

For once, I smiled back. "Well how can I be sure that you're not?"

He stared at me for a while, those eyes of brown deepening in the silence. His lips were cracked, eyebrows flat against his skin of honey, freckles like stars against the moonlight glow of his face. Curls rested at the corners of his ears melancholy, and for a while his whole body seemed still. Then, he moved. "I know a way to show you."

I leaned forward, cocking a brow. The sheets ruffled at our movements, my hands grasping the duvet firmly. Half of me was cautious about the sound—would his parents hear?—but the other half didn't care anymore: it said fuck it, and off with caution. It said that life's too short to live wondering. So I let my hands crinkle the satin sheets as I spoke my wonders aloud to see if they would play to reality. "Show me."

There was a feeling, after that. The feeling of your heart skipping, the need for a deep intake of air whilst the wind suffocated you, the blood thrumming through your head after turning it too fast. A pleasure that wriggled the toes on one's feet, that sent goosebumps littering the skin like faint kisses in the summers heat. A feeling that brings a fearful delight to seize your lungs and eyes: they flutter like butterflies with a soft, prancing joy fuelled by the knowledge of what it means to be free. And when Seth Marken kissed me that day, that morning, that hour, beneath his sheets, engulfed in the smell of him—in everything that was wholly him—I knew of that feeling.

I think I had always known it, the feeling, looking back on the memory. His smiles and intense passion for art and little scrunches of the nose all ignited the feeling, but I think I rejected the notion then. Or perhaps I neglected it, never let it be shrouded in the light of my attention for longer than a millisecond. But then—as his hands drew constellations on my skin and as mine sang songs of forgotten tales to his hair—I knew with certainty that I could no longer deny it.

The feeling, the notion, the explosive joy—the freedom of butterflies kissing summers skies. It was different, a stranger to me, and maybe to Seth, but it was there, rooted deep within the both of us. Love, or something like it.

We didn't part for a while. We didn't leave each other's embrace for hours. We fell asleep holding hands, our skin patterned with the careless drawings of two adolescents falling in love; and for the first time in years, Seth slept soundly in the dark.