My right hand is the span of the earth, it reaches for you from either side of the largest ocean.
My right hand is the one that met you first. A handshake that wakes every nerve in my body
to say it's time to get up.
It was supposed to be a temporary hookup, that led to feelings spilling out of bodies like a Mento in a liter of soda.
Spewing from every orifice like a leaky faucet, I try to stop it myself--something like a handyman but not so handy.
My toolbox consists of bubble gum and mixtapes created for you. Every song hand-selected like flowers for a bouquet.
Phone calls morph minutes into hours into "please just fall asleep with me." Because the last good night's sleep I had was
when I woke up to your snores and a gentle cry of my name. A name that was foreign to you and now I sit up on your
chest and ask for an encore.
The blue walls--barren but if they could speak, they would be weak to the knees with stories of our love. How we
slept together often, no naked bodies; just a mime's performance of "head in the nape of a neck, eyes closed and mouth
parted just to claim I am not sleeping and instead, I am resting my eyes."
That's what my mother would say when she would settle down on the couch and watch Law and Order, that she is
simply resting her eyes. When she said she didn't like you, I knew it was a lie but I didn't want to pry.
How could I tell? Because she never was really good at poker and her tell was her face, the way it would mimic the
light in my eyes whenever I spoke of you. Which was often.
Which was frequently like seasons changing--you turned my cold branches to blooming trees like a weeping willow
in the wind. You swayed with me and didn't mention your pollen allergy. Hid your sneezes from me so I wouldn't feel
bad but I will say "bless you" just in case.
The blue walls would be on trial and have to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
They would with confidence recall the night we ate Teddy Grahams and Sour Patch Kids while my favorite album played
lowly. Down low so we could hear the inevitable creak of stairs from interrupting parents coming
to make sure there is no touching or unbuttoning. To their dismay--or rather their liking, nothing but discussion steamed
from our hot mouths.
Well, not my mouth, I had cottonmouth, a dry mouth because looking at you makes me catch my breath. Causes the
circuitry in my brain to malfunction. Forgetting everything that it's ever known; the only thing that can be processed is
the feeling that I get when fingers intertwined like basket weaving, each finger fitting perfectly in between mine.
Like the last middle piece of a puzzle that has been untouched for months. The frustration of being incomplete keeping me
away. Let's frame that puzzle we finished on the day it rained for hours and made minutes feel like centuries.
I was medicated, hopped up on stolen glances in crowded rooms, secret touches, and spontaneous dates that always ended with food.
It's the type of high that high school health teachers warned about when it comes to self-medicating. No one warns you
about the addiction that you find when you're not looking, the one that comes in the form of brown eyes and scars from an adolescent case of the chicken pox.
Send me to rehab, because this is not an addiction I can kick. No 12 step program can save me, claim me, redefine me,
because at the end of the day while the audience tells me the answer is run I will look at you and realize that staying is my
best guess. It's the type of love that at seventeen you think that "this is it."
Seeing as we are not 17 anymore, it's the type of love that makes me want to lose my memory so I have to find you and
fall for you all over again. An easy love that makes the context of a young adult section of the local Barnes and Noble
blush with jealousy.
It's a love that makes the generations before we choke on their catchphrases "you're too young", "it's just a phase",
"you don't know what love is."
They are right. I don't know what love is, I know what this love is and that makes all of the difference.
