Work Text:
The first day back to school after it happened,
I almost broke into your locker. Because you were
late and I know your combination like the dialogue
from Star Wars and I couldn’t shake the sick smell of
your gasoline even though I had no reason to be finding
it, not anywhere or in anything. Not in the fucking hallway.
But still, I caught a whiff of it and I wondered if you’d even
make it in for class. Should I have called you? Stayed over?
He’s good enough and he can take you but maybe it was my
responsibility. My hands trembled as I took my phone out of
my pocket and they shook as I brushed my fingers down the
screen to go over the exchange of text messages we sent each
other and search for any clues that maybe you did something
to yourself or maybe you didn’t and my hands just wouldn’t
stop fucking shaking, storm-swept branches banging on a window.
My voice would have done the same so it’s a good thing
that I wasn’t talking to anyone or hearing someone talk
to me or ask me questions I had no interest in because
they would’ve heard that wavering intonation and there’s
no way they would’ve let me live it down much less go
without explaining what could get me so rattled that I lost
my tongue and couldn’t make my lips work either. Voiceless or I
may as well have been because what could I have to say to any
person but yourself. Nothing I say to them has any kind of point.
You’re the one who makes my words meaningful, you’re the one
who gives me any reason to run my mouth off like I always do.
And in the hallway by myself, alone in the crowd of classmates,
stroking my fingertips down the cold metal of your locker’s door,
I heard your words again, stumbled over my own mind as I tried to
banish them and the thought that you weren’t coming in today or
ever again. But then a hand fell on my shoulder. I jumped; you
squeezed me. I guess I looked pale because you asked me if I felt okay.
(and I want so much to believe that this was special treatment and not
the way you are with everyone because it’s really not that you don’t mean
it when you ask these things but you ask everybody how they’re doing
and you care so much it’s killing you but even then you never stop,
you never take a moment for yourself but I’m just selfish like that, I
guess because I wanted you to be asking that because of me specifically
I wanted to be the only one you’d ever ask even though I know it’s shitty
to want something like that from anyone least of all someone who shines
as bright as you, whose smile could bring anybody, weeping, to their knees).
And I told you that I was even though I don’t really think that’s true at all
because you grabbed my shoulder and you dug your fingertips in to my
armatures of fragile bone and muscle and you smiled like everything was
A-okay even though I know it’s not. And for that moment, it was all enough.