Prose On Your Tongue

slipped through my fingers, finally, my love?

once you found my eyes in the dreary afternoon,

i scooped you up and you told me,

“i’m making no promises, dear.”

once you found me in the middle of the dark,

you crawled beneath my lifeless arms and you asked me,

“slipped through my fingers, finally, my love?”

---

Although I got rejected, I’ll never regret confessing my feelings for Tanner ‘Nes’ Bradford in - I don’t think - the entirety of my life. No — there’s something magical and tingling about adolescent love confessions that I don’t understand why any of us try to avoid. It’s amazing how something as simple and harmless as, “I want to be with you,” makes all of us shake in our shoes; tremble in the extremities; beat hard in our chests. When he looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Sorry, Dan,” I knew what was about to happen, and, of course, it hurt, really fucking bad, actually, but I sat there on the log and listened to what he had to say anyway, because the hurt in my chest would never subside if I didn’t hear an explanation.

“I don’t like guys,” he told me simply. “You’re a cool guy, but . . . you know - that’s the thing - you’re a cool . . . guy.”

Nes told me this, but I thought silly things away. Simply: I’m not much of a looker — not at all, actually. My body’s like a weed; it’s spindly and full of all these awkward, drooping curves, and has a lack of any shape or defining muscles. My nose jerks forward suddenly as it grows nearer to the tip ( I’ve run my fingers over this bump probably almost five hundred times in the past year), my lips are so thin you can barely call them lips, and my eyes - my god, my eyes - are like the dark, beady eyes of a Chihuahua. And, because of these blatant and horrid imperfections, I thought that was the reason why Nes was letting me off so easy. Of course, that isn’t the reason at all, but I let it be a lesson to me that beautiful men don’t date ugly cave-dwellers.

And then I finally realized that the reason he let me off easy was because he - just like he said - didn’t like men. I guess I refused to accept it, because I truly wanted to believe Nes was past those gender fences that have been plaguing our children since the moment they were born. I wanted to believe that everything would work out; that Nes would look into these dark eyes of mine, spread a dangerous smile across those dangerous lips, and tell me, among the burning campfire: “I’ll be yours for as long as you’ll have me.”

As long as I’ll have him:

forever.