paper rings | a songfic

without all the exes, fights, & flaws.

all this to lead back to this goddamn party.

the drive home is almost silent, save for the creak and shudder of my car's ancient air conditioning unit. i feel as though i'm choking on unsaid words, that they're clawing up my throat like venom to be spit into empty silence and then driven away from, tires screeching and windows rolled up.

the silence is amiable, however, so i keep my mouth shut, lips pressed together, until i feel your hand on my arm. you're still smiling, but now it looks hesitant and quiet, bordering on sheepish.

i pull into your driveway, the shadow of your house looming over and casting the grass and shrubbery into relative darkness. "what's up?"

you're still drunk enough, of course, but your eyes look more serious. maybe. you pull something from your pocket and press it into my hand and - oh my god - you made me a paper ring. as in, a folded post-it note in a strangely familiar shade of god-awful royal blue. and you've drawn a smiley face on the front.

"i meant to. . .i meant to give this to. . .to you when i, uh, asked. . .you to go to this, but i. . . forgot." your words are slurred and coated in probably a few too many red solo cups worth of drinks and you keep forgetting and backtracking and starting again, but: you get the words out and they fall, in a mockery of insignificance, into the space between us, over the stick-shift in my old car. they stick like honey and they're sweet like it, too. you're still smiling. i'm staring at the ring in my palm and my eyes flash up to see that you have one on, too. on your left ring finger, in the same sickly shade of blue. oh my god.

i look up and our eyes meet and i wonder: what does this mean? it's a ring, but made of paper. with a smiley face drawn on. that you made. for me. so we could match.

i look up and i wonder and i think. i think about you, stumbling into class on bleary-eyed monday mornings, asking for my notes because you're five minutes late and stopped to get both of us coffee on the walk here, conveniently forgetting that i hate coffee. you take both coffees and offer me a hug or a high five or a kiss instead- all jokes meaning nothing but your eyes lose their fogginess and begin to gleam as you joke with me and i say "whatever, just take it, idiot," before we get yelled at by another first period teacher. i consider our respective family struggles and complications and how, maybe, you feel more like family than the people i go home to every day because what's a family if they don't even know your name? i remember all the drives we've been on together - pointless and late-night, in a desperate search to find an area less polluted by light, or even just a drive to the nice store that's too far to walk to - and i think about the music and rolled-down windows and lyrics screamed and lost into the wind, but what makes it all is that you're in the passenger seat, always.

i wonder how two people, who crave precision and repetition amidst upturned lives boiling over with chaos, ended up as a reckless pair of friends who give each other paper rings at midnight.

and i think, for the first time (or maybe the second, or the third, or-), that i wish you were serious about those coffee-payment-apology-hugs. i lean across the gearshift and hope that, maybe, secretly, you wished i would say yes one of these days, anyway.