for the boy who wants to love me, but can't.

i.
he came to me in the midst of my reality, soft-spoken but full of the tragedy i desired. i needed the feel of his current dragging me down to a place where i felt warm and alive once more. we knew, but we didn’t speak about, the innate failure of a fairytale we possessed in every syllable and every breath we took when we tried to convince ourselves to say goodbye. instead of leaving i drew circles across his hands, tracing ouroboros in all of my sleepless nights. i watched him breathe in his promises and exhale the venom of his truths. he told me he would never lie to me, and in that one instant i knew that this elegant and uncensored creature would give me exactly what those shooting stars could never deliver- absolute finality. i cried just to know that the trees would die again and he, he would let me fall and never ask me to turn back.


ii.
we had picnics on the carpeted floor back then, with our hearts on our sleeves and my head in his lap. he dreamed of saving lives, and i dreamed of being with him now and forever. i never knew how to tell him that i wanted to be a part of his future. i needed a portion of him to stay with me, but those words never escaped and i just drowned in the density of his eyes and the octaves of his voice. i wanted to scream and run to him for shelter, to be honest with him and myself, to pretend his words didn’t sting and find my happy ending. but the lives of lonely people become like looking through a fishbowl and we retreated back to those words we would never allow ourselves to say.


iii.
he told me i was beautiful one night, much more beautiful than i would never give myself credit for. he said the pain in my eyes and the strain in my words made things seem like a movie, where the girl becomes broken and you almost want to die for her misery. he said that he wanted to make it so his touch would heal me, and even though i told him i wasn’t broken, we both knew behind all of my falsehoods and insecurities i fell into fourteen golden pieces at his feet. he told me that there was something to be said about those stars that learned to live without the light of everyone around them- those stars that learned to shine for themselves. he told me i was strong, and i told him i would be stronger if i had him beside me. we both wanted it so badly, but knew in all our silences that there would never be another chance for us lonely people to be truly in love. the people like me who learned to live alone didn’t do it because we wanted to, we did it because it’s easier than being disappointed.


iv.
i never told him that in the midst of all the chaos surrounding us, he brought me the most glorifying peace. he haunted me in the most brilliant of ways, ways that I could only describe in jumbled dream sequences. i told these dreams to him in the silence of his sleep, the only time when i could have the strength to speak. he told me it was cute the way i curled into him when it stormed outside, and i told him it was because it was in that place i was safe. we both knew in those times that we could maybe learn to feel something, but never enough, never enough to begin to know what it was to not be alone.