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Whiplash- was that it?
No, it couldn’t be, not when the word seemed too fast, too sudden, too unnerving, too… too… what was the word?
His head, his head was full but empty at the same time, and it was hot but it felt barren and cold and… what was the word? Whiplash didn’t fit, not when the very definition of the word implied that the feeling was sudden.
It didn’t fit when the feeling had been standing in the corner of his apartment for a long time while he refused to acknowledge that it was there. The stranger in the corner had no color, but had a presence; no real name, but possessed an identity.
He hated it, but he was intimate with it, but he hated it, but it knew him well, and he wanted it dead when it was never alive in the first place and what was the word, what was the word, what was the word -
It floated in through one ear and out the other. It switched back and forth like he was wearing broken headphones that he had to hold a certain way to get the sound to work. He could twist the wires all he wanted but eventually, he would get frustrated enough to go out and buy new ones. Despite this, he still tried. He needed to grasp onto something, anything other than the moonlight that streamed through his window and poured onto his bed.
It really did look like it poured onto his bed, liters, and liters of it pooling between the wrinkles of his sheets. It was water mixing with the milk of his bed, something pure mixing in with the monotony of white and nothing else. His sight filled up more, and he couldn't explain it in a way that made any sense but now he was swimming in his sheets, kicking his feet more and more, and now he was drowning in them and couldn't breathe-
He sat up.
It's dark in his room, and Teruki is sitting up in his bed. His pillow was close to his chest, intimate with the sound of his heartbeat.
"You really are," he started, eyes glazed and unfocused, "So cool." The air around him was flattered at the words. It melted away from his breath. He melted into his sheets once again. Heat came in through the open window but he was too dazed to close it. He felt foggy, not because his thoughts were convoluted and bunched up into groups of feelings that not even he could count, but because he truly felt like fog. He was light, and gray, and airy, and he felt like dancing, dancing...until...
...There was something that he felt, something that he found between his mind that was still switching between one side and the other. But then he caught it. He caught the feeling.
He found the word. It was the way a smile, his smile, would start slow from the top of his face. His eyebrows would fall up his forehead and melt from a carefully calculated look. His eyes would crinkle at the edges and his nose would flare. And then his lips would widen unevenly across his face. It wasn't the type of smile that would be too bright for someone like Teruki to look at. It was the right amount of warmth, the perfect temperature of a morning shower, refreshing, cleansing.
All he had were thoughts that he could associate with one another, ones that would keep on going on and on until he stopped the faucet. But then sometimes his faucet would break and then everything would come spilling all at once whenever there was a text or a phone call, and it would keep spilling and spilling until he would have to clog it up with something else because he couldn't he couldn't let it pour out and pool like the moonlight into his bedsheets because he might find himself drowning once again, and, and-
The corner of his pillow had brushed against his collarbone as if it were reminding him of something. It had felt his heart. It was only supposed to be an organ, but somehow Teruki had let it become more than that.
The word twiddled its thumbs. The word was his hands, his eyes, shared looks, shared laughter.
"You're amazing," he said to the empty air, and the empty air only. "And I've fallen in love with you."
The sentence was a fistful of words. One of them burned his tongue.