There is that one stretch of highway, miles long, and no matter how many times my tires race it, or my feet pace it, it doesn’t answer. Maybe it’s because I still find myself trying to articulate the question. out loud. to myself. when I think no one’s watching, and no one’s around to see me furrow my brow. I try to form the words and I find my tongue heavy, and stuck to my palate, and they just won’t come.
I miss the feeling of unrequited love. I miss the feeling of wanting someone so bad it hurts. Or rather, I miss the hopeful feeling that goes along with it, that only exists before the first kisses and the last embrace.
Time, the proverbial healer, really fucked me on this one. It’s like I’ve had to trick myself into believing that you don’t exist. I know you are out there, somewhere, in that place you chose, so far away from me. In a life, so different from the one I live. But I had to choose to only see a one-dimensional version of you- a photo in an album, a postcard with a half-assed signature, a life-size, fleshless, bloodless, cardboard cut-out version of you.
But then lately, it’s all come back to me in swells and rushes. In dreams. In insomnia. In restlessness and restfulness. In strange places. In my mind.
You were the first man that I had a real school girl’s crush on. In the most innocent, lovely, simple, even juvenille way.
I wanted you to like me, and think I was pretty.
I wanted you to notice me, and pick me first when we played dodgeball.
That was part of it. After spending so much time in a “grown-up” world, I somehow had forgotten how much holding someone’s hand could mean. how much a first kiss could take your breath away.
And then there was how much you fit my silly ideal description of what a man should be right down to the last detail. Not just physically. I mean you were tall, and dark, and handsome- not in a pretty way, but in a rugged, rough around the edges way. And you were so strong, and bigger than me, yet somehow a vulnerability emanated from you. In a way that made me feel like only I was special enough to see it. In a way that made me allow myself to let you see mine. It was like your being such a man, just made me want to be a lady. and oddly enough, I enjoyed it. Sand and glass, you and me. You polished me, and made me smoother, and softer, and more delicate, but also more fragile. You refined me, and defined me in ways that you still don’t know.
you still don’t know.
