secret language

OO2﹒mirrorball

James

I get out of my black car and stand on the porch of a girl I'm ready to call mine, but my mind would never allow me such satisfaction. I see myself in her, despite the fact that I have been lost in my own mind for as long as I can remember, and what is love if your mind is absent? Those are the thoughts that cross a sick man's mind while he waits for a pretty girl to open her door for him.

She welcomes me in by opening her door for me. Her door is decorated just like her soul, unlike mine, which is losing itself more and more in her lips, her past, her present, and losing itself more and more in the possibility of our future.

I invite her to a disco with me so she can shine brighter than the disco ball that will be hanging above her ginger hair. For some reason, she agrees to dance with a man like me and says yes.

We get into my car, and she sits in the passenger seat next to me. Her hair flowing with each whisper of wind that comes her way, making such weather as lovely as her thoughts. I wouldn't mind taking the long way home with her. I'd want to drive with such presence for as long as my mind hits me with the reality of my incapability to ever give her peace.

We enter a building shimmering with flashing lights of all sorts of colours, just like all the colours of the gemstones I see when I look at Betty's amber eyes. Surrounded by dancing, drunken bodies, I still only see her and her dress, her black lipstick and sequin smile. Her eyes act as an escape which I run to when I'm filled with diseases.

I ask for her hand in a dance. We order drinks, dance, laugh, and smile. We see all versions of ourselves in one another. All kinds of hormones rush through my body, serotonin that's only triggered when she laughs at me as if I was a comedic actor. Adrenaline every time she stands on her tiptoes and kisses me, as if my lips save her from the kind of agony she's been feeling ever since the person who was supposed to be her idol left her and only left traces all over her, none of them as beautiful as an inch of her skin.

I tell her she shimmers just like the disco ball we're both staring at, and I tell her to keep kissing me as if she'll taste love potions when her tongue is on mine. I tell her I always want to see her like this and never as upset as she was the other night. I tell her that if she gets upset again and breaks even into a million little pieces, I'd mold her broken pieces with my own. 

She tells me not to think about bad days because, as long as I'm with her, she'll forget all about her bad days. I don't tell her I'm going to leave. I don't tell her I'll fuck it all up. I don't tell her I'm not capable of what she deserves. I don't tell her I've never been able to have the love my mother always wished for me. I don't tell her I can't afford love. Instead, I hold her hand and twirl her around like any gentleman would do when he sees such a face.

She gets on her tiptoes and dances with me as if no one is around us. I twirl her around till we both feel dizzy and laugh about nothing. I tell her she's shining, blinding me with her light, and she tells me she only shines for me. She tells me she'd change anything about herself just to shine for me, but I don't tell her she's not the one who needs a change but it's me who does.

I never expected to have such a pretty woman in front of me telling me that she'd do anything to have my love. She tells me she feels safe when she breathes the same air I'm breathing. She tells me I'm the only one she felt such realness from, unlike all the masquerade revelers in her life.

I decide to show her some mercy by telling her a snippet of what I feel around her, a snippet of the truth. The alcohol makes me courageous enough to tell her that this will one day end, but the alcohol in her makes her spacey and makes her repress the reality of my words. She tells me to stop talking about such horrid possibilities, but she doesn't know that's the only possibility of this.

I'm put out of my thoughts and she's put out of her expectations when the owners of the place we've been losing ourselves in for hours shout at everyone to get out because there's been illegal drinking.

We rush out of the building, our breaths being taken away. We're having the kind of moment everyone in middle school dreams of having. I wonder what the adults seated on benches are thinking of us as we run like wild kids with wild dreams. Teeangers who fell in love faster than someone can say "love". The flawlessness of this moment takes me back to dreams I've had as a young boy, but then waking up and remembering that the stars I'll see in someone's eyes will grow duller with every passing second.

We go back to my car, the place in which we seem to fall for one another the most. She tells me she doesn't want the night to end, so she puts music on and dances with me even more drunkenly than when we were in blinding lights.

In this mere second of elation, I want to tell her how important she is to me and how I might get back to my house and cry my heart out to God, wishing he would've given me the ability to fall in love, go on adventures with a lover, kiss a lover and feel those butterflies, feel my soul mend with theirs, find the pieces of me that had been lost due to trauma in a lover. I want to tell her how there are robbers to the west and clowns to the east, but I'd still give her my sunshine, although the rain is always going to come if she's standing with me.

She dances with me and looks at me as if I were the one to put stars in the sky. I want to reward her for giving me those rare raw feelings by proving to her that her starry eyes spark up my darkest nights, that her flowers grow back as thorns. I want to give her the world and tell her all the drama queens have been taking swings and all the jokers have been dressing up as kings, but they fade to nothing when I look at her. She's my daydream walking on the earth, but I can never give her the daydreams she wishes for.