At times, it seemed as if we'd been starved of each other for too long. Days apart would cause aches between and yet I felt clearer in the head without you around.
You were the revival of a Béethoven sonata. Your heart was a fugitive nestled between my ribs, and I fed you sweet things like honey tea at one past when you couldn't forget. You asked me that the second night we fought.
"Would you forget? If you could, would you forget?"
Moonlight composed melodies in your crystalline eyes. They were sometimes filled with a substance that dripped holes on my mattress. Your voice held an urgency that had no deadline. I wanted to comfort you, I wanted to love you until your muscles gave away under my hands. I wanted to persuade sweet sounds out of your mouth.
"No. No, I wouldn't. Would you?"
You sighed. "Wouldn't it be better?"
"But to remember means having experience. You'd have to learn everything over again."
"What if everything after that thing hurt?"
"Then time makes sure you're okay. Listen," I said, "if you forgot, if you somehow woke up with amnesia, you still aren't...immune. It's better to know it than not, right? If you were somehow erased, you'll pick it up again."
"And if you could prevent that pain? Stop now or suffer later? Which one would you choose."
"Always the latter," I said. "I wouldn't choose anything else. Ever."
Afraid you'd fallen asleep, I leaned over and pressed my lips against your shoulder. Up to your clavicle (fragile places to plant flowers) and up to your neck and up to right below your jaw. Breathed out. Inhaled. Somehow imprinted.
"I won't regret," I said. "I'd eat cake and get diabetes if it meant I'd never be able to have it again."
That far stretch tickled something in you and you smiled. We fell in a steady rhythm and lifted the sheets above us, creating a world of our own.
Our whole lives, we've been lonely for something we couldn't pinpoint. We moved around with our eyes on the material and the beautiful thinking that'll ease the slow burn of existentialism. There were no proofs to this theorem but at five in the morning, the crushing feeling in my chest seemed to support it. I woke up without conscience and with a yearning.
Throughout the day, that burrowed desire leaves as I found treatment in your skin and voice.
"Tell me it gets easier," you whispered.
I recited it to you like a sermon. Between us, you were younger not only in age but in wisdom. It never felt that way but sometimes, your greenness would emerge and yet, how counterintuitive was it for us? We would have always feared the unknown even if our futures were predictable.
* * *
We were the soft thrumming of rain that night.
"When you do that..." My breath hitched. "I love when you do that."
"You love when I don't too," you said, voice dripping with satisfaction. Your arrogance was reserved for me.
"Are you tired?" I asked.
You shook your head. We took a break and that pause led us to your living room, then to your kitchen.
Drinking water in the middle of the night was turned romantic under the steady stream of lone streetlights beating through your kitchen window. You leaned on the counter and took a picture of me because I wanted to know. That was the night I found comfort in having skin—the gentle dip of my back illuminated tender yellow, back smooth and spine winding, the prints of weather stains on the window pane a second birthmark.
"You know...I always wondered why you didn't date my friend. Friends. Why you don't date but you're naked in my place right now," you said. On your lips were questioning and teasing.
"Because your friends weren't you," I said smoothly.
You laughed, still sort of hushed, as if you were scared of waking up your neighbors. "You didn't even know me." A pause. A beat. "Do—"
"I'm so glad I did," I said. "I've never asked a person out in my entire life, and you happened to be the first one that said yes."
You chuckled like you didn't get me and in all honestly, I didn't either. You knew why I didn't date. I knew why you didn't either. Yet somehow, we found ourselves having this conversation after two-and-some months together, knowing each other in the most intimate of ways. We loved talking about ourselves—me, you, and together. While contact was an unreachable high, our talks were confessions mostly. Confessions of our past and who we were. My time together with you gave me reason to respect religion.
"So why not my friend? He liked you so much, you know?"
"I didn't know him."
"You didn't know me either."
"I didn't want to know him. He said he liked me. How could he like me if he never once spoke to me or made an effort? Your other friend too. Was there some sort of bet? Did you win it or?"
You've never backtracked faster, and I had the glimpse of the flustered you, the you when your inappropriate ringtone-of-the-month sounded during an exam. On your knees, you were a portrait of hesitation and passion.
"Did you want to know me?" you asked.
Of course you knew the answer—we all loved validation.
"Everywhere."
"That's hot," you said. "You're hotter."
Though your voice was acting, you were not.
"Gross," I said quietly.
You approached me from your comfortable position by the fridge, a forest fire your eyes and a promised inferno your mouth. I stood enamored and cornered.
"How many days?" you asked.
"Six."
"Six," you repeated. "Six. Would you still eat cake?"
By then, you weren't asking me anymore. By then, you were asking yourself. We both felt it, that immense, suffocating crack that carved the atmosphere in two. It had been pressing on us all night—maybe that's why we were so besotted. Tears dotted our eyes, and we became a crooning nocturne.
"Would you be happy with her?" I asked.
We never forgot.
My tone wasn't accusatory. My tone wasn't anything but wonder and nostalgia and you knew that too which is why you relaxed into me. It was also why you never replied—did you want to spare me?
In the morning, you left. I had less than a week left of the year. That morning, you kissed me sans tongue and sans hands, knelt on the side of my bed. You sighed and your head sunk into the crook of your elbow, which you had propped on your knee. There was melancholy to the godless-praying you assumed.
And then after I knew, after I knew, and after I knew, you left.
