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It happened all at once. Saying it was unexpected would be a lie, but I was entirely unprepared for it, and that is a true thing. Recognizing truth is not within my abilities, I grew up learning the art of side-stepping and round-about conversation and it has left me with a lack of sense for truth, and a great many ways of dancing around it, so when my feelings for you became undeniable I did not quite understand the realness of them, could not see them even as they hit me square in the face.
I can pinpoint the moment they started, even though I didn’t become aware of them until much later, it was the 22nd of September and the air tasted of autumn and renewal and your lips of honey bread and lavender tea and we were behind your mother’s house and it was mid morning and I had just said terrible things about her not being your mother by blood and you knew, I suspect, that I was just trying to distract myself from the way you were looking at me, and I had to say it, had to tell you “god, will you stop looking at me like that”, affecting annoyance that was truly a whole lot of terror, but you didn’t stop looking at me like that, because you’ve never been one to listen when you’re told what to do, and instead you kissed me when I sure as hell didn’t deserve it, and that tore down the dam and the water came rushing through and that’s when they started.
It happened all at once.
Might’ve been that, had that been the only time, I could have gotten over it. Not immediately, of course, but after a few years and quite a bit of talking shit about you to my friends, I might think of you and not immediately associate you with the feeling of the wood against my back and the world between my fingers as you pushed me against the shed in the backyard of your mother’s house that first day of autumn and the unmatched (and, I’m sure, illegal in some areas) green of your irises and the sound of your laugh and the shape of your laugh and the taste of your laugh became things that I knew like my own mind.
Might’ve been, but we’ll never know, because I was deep into a friendship with your stupid best friend by then and was at your mother’s house every other Sunday and every other Sunday you would stare at me from the moment I stepped through that chipped yellow door and your eyes, which have never hidden a single thing in your 26 years, would zero in on my hair or the back of my hands or the scar beside my lip and then you would try to get me alone and I would refuse because I knew you were to become my ruin if I gave in, and already I would lose focus at work more often than not, thinking of that one kiss even as months passed, or of your eyes on me at brunch every other Sunday in your mother’s house or of the times you would brush past me while we helped carry food from the kitchen to the table or the single time I held a jug of hibiscus tea in my hands and my hair was all in my face and you pulled it back and tied it for me without a second thought. Already I could barely make it through my day by allowing myself to think of you only in small doses, which was increasingly more difficult as my repertoire of memories to choose from grew every other Sunday. I wonder how I didn’t realize then, but it took me months, still. Perhaps I thought being obsessed with you was simply something we all did. I’ve already said I’m particularly good at lying, even more so when it’s to myself.
Through all those brunches and all those looks and all that wondering about the freckles on your wrist and the dreams with your hands up in my hair, it never occurred to me to wonder what you thought of me, why you’d kissed me that 22nd of September with honey bread and lavender lips, if you distracted yourself thinking of me like I distracted myself thinking of you. I never wondered, could only concern myself with my own overwhelming reactions to you every other Sunday and a hearty dose of self-loathing that I suspect convinced me that you were only aware of my existence as long as I was standing in front of you.
I’m one to turn inwards whenever I’m unsure, and I’m afraid I might’ve come across as insular and aloof, which of course couldn’t be further from the truth, but I suppose you had no alternatives to think of when I avoided conversation with you at all costs and cut off all attempts to get me alone every other Sunday. I’m difficult almost by definition. Even when I began to understand, months after that one kiss against the shed in the backyard of your mother’s house, that you held a significant piece of my heart, I could not bring myself to change anything at those brunches every other Sunday, was too scared to think of someone else having as much power over me as I knew I’d already given you without your knowledge. The truth is that, at that point, there was nothing that would have kept me away from you, but as I’ve said, true things do not play to my strengths.
The 22nd of September seemed far in the past, autumn danced its way into winter and she into spring and the narcissus by the shed in the backyard of your mother’s house bloomed beautifully before I showed up for brunch on a Sunday and it was just us two. You’d asked the rest of your family to give you space, you explained, so you could talk to me. I don’t know how I didn’t bolt right then. That second kiss, the morning of the 16th of April, underneath the high arches separating the kitchen and the living room of your mother’s house, had me trembling from my toes to the tips of my hair and you said “shhh, shhh” and kissed your way down my cheekbones to my lips and I sure wanted to bolt right then, but not as sure as I wanted my feet to grow roots and keep me in that moment for as long as I lived.
You said “I’ve wanted you for so long” and my heart stopped because I knew you couldn’t mean it because how could you, when I am so difficult to want and always find the wrong thing to say and never know when to stay or when to go, and that felt like an important truth but I wanted so badly to believe the lie that I kissed your honey and lavender lips right back, and then between every other Sunday I would keep myself from thoughts of you only to melt against the shed behind your mother’s house every other Sunday with your lips on mine and your hands a heavy weight tracing over my skin in patterns I swore I could feel all through the week and when Summer came I learned what you looked like with grass stains on the knees of your jeans while I bit on my fist leaning against the shed because I was scared of what my traitorous mouth would run with when you were allowed to unmake me in the way that you were just then, with your knees on the grass and your eyes on mine and that’s when I told myself I did not deserve you but by hell I would still have you.
I became sure of my badness when I saw your goodness in childhood and I couldn’t let you simply let yourself have me without a warning and so I gave one, the next Sunday, under a heavy August rain and it was nearly going on a year since that first kiss and I had loved you all the way through and maybe before even that and I said to you that I am not meant to be loved and that all the ones who have loved me have been rotten and that I don’t know how to talk without poison and that I shoot to kill when I’m hurt and that I was the villain in the same story in which you were the hero and that people like me weren’t meant for people like you, who deserve only the unbroken.
But your lips tasted of honey and lavender and rain and your name was fine-printed in every corner of my heart by then and even though my warning was full of true things, you asked if I trusted you and I said I did and you asked me to trust that you could tell the wrong sort by yourself.
Then I had you, and your honey and lavender lips and your unlawful green eyes and the shape of your laugh and your grass-stained knees and your heavy hands. And I always will.