u arn't gud 4 me.

.not so peachy keen.

He hated peaches.

When he was 11 he lost a bet, and as a punishment he was forced to eat an entire moldy peach. Not good for someone with a weak stomach, as one could imagine. The rest of his day was filled with vomiting and crying in bed, and now he can't even look at a peach without feeling sick.

So he ate a peach whenever he was with me.

I wasn't allowed to be a part of his real life, you see. His real life was uniform and by the books. It was eating dinner with his family every night at exactly 7 o'clock and getting straight A's every single year. It was pressed pants and clip on ties for church every Sunday morning. It was the normality he was used to and wanted to protect. So when we made the mistake of falling in love he needed a way to separate the two different parts of his now overly complicated life. The part that the rest of the world had to see and the part reserved just for me. Sadly, that quickly turned into the part he hated because it wasn't who he was supposed to be.

The boy I knew liked to go thrift shopping every Wednesday after school after telling his parents he was at the library, studying for one thing or another. He liked to drag me along to all of the places he had been dying to see for years but couldn't because they were deemed too inappropriate for someone as high class as him. On the weekends that we were free we would walk to everywhere and nowhere at the same exact time, too happy to be with each other to care about the blistering summer air that reddened our skin.

It only lasted for the summer.

Sun burns and cool breezes that shake the stagnant heat will always remind me of him. His laughter will tinkle alongside the grasshoppers by my window every night as I try to sleep. Every summer I'll only be able to think of the proper boy in cram school whose only wish was to explore the world. Smoldering afternoons will fill my brain with memories of ice cubes swapped between parched mouths. Of roaming hands sticky with the residue of melted popsicles. Of skinny dipping in the lake when the only one watching us was the vast night sky with its millions of eyes.

Maybe it's better to forget him while I can. After all, I knew what I was getting into when he told me he was only here for the summer. To visit relatives and get away from the dull home he was used to. It's been months since he left me without even a kiss goodbye and I haven't heard a word from him. I gave him my number. Of course I did. A boy like that is so hard to come by. One who is so captivated by the simple things like thrift shopping that he insists on doing so every week. He never bought anything. Too risky with parents like his. Instead he liked to browse the aisles, begging me to take pictures of him with his favorite finds so I could have something nice to remember him by. As if I wouldn't struggle to keep him out of my mind already.

Polaroids of him and us together are tucked away in the drawers of my desk as a futile attempt to keep him out of sight and out of mind. No matter how well I hide them, though, my mind can't forget the dust of freckles across his sun kissed cheeks. The way he downed sodas and juice boxes like a child trying sugar for the first and last time. How his lips always tasted like peaches. He really hated peaches.

And now I think I do too.