{image found here}
There was once a boy I was infatuated with.
I thought the long looks he sent me from across the room were of want and need, of bashfulness and of insecurity. Only after I fell out of infatuation with him did I realise that he has the same wide eyes for everyone, brown-tinted irises and bushy eyebrows that never bent a different way for me. An emotion I once dare mistake for captivated was actually just perplexed.
He was wondering why the tight-lipped girl who hardly formed a string of words in his presence was looking so curiously at him. I had thought, some several summers ago, that a boy who held my gaze for four seconds straight and did not let go had to be in some kind of love with me. I had never found out if that was a misconception or not.
On some occasions the tips of his fingers would brush against mine, and I would feel the supposed sparks of electricity in a deep pit of my stomach. I was set on the assumption that these touches were not coincidental, but part of a ploy of a magnetic boy who knew whose fingers were the north to his south. Or at the least, happy accidents born of a silent desire repeated so many times – in a head usually so quiet – that the Forces of the Universe bent to his wishes. I wanted to tell him that I would gladly hold his hand and walk as far as he wanted; but I only recently realised that he had never planned to hear those words from me.
When I was still in infatuation with him, I thought that he was exactly what my heart wanted. Countless nights my subconscious would play back his face, and in the morning I would wake up with the sun in my hair and a stupid smile on my face. For hours I would ponder on my approach for when I next met him, like a chess game I was playing with delicate fingers, playing for a stake I did not want to lose.
I ended up with a bitter stalemate, a halfway-there-but-not-quite, the definition of “in the middle of nowhere” leaving an unusual taste on my tongue.
Unapologetically, I had given all I could to him for two years. Every conversation that was too far out of comfort zone, every forlorn stare, every indiscreet comment. Every fantasy of the future, every content smile thinking “I’ll wait for him”, every poem I ever wrote for him.
It was only infatuation, but it still hurts when he looks me in the eye.
{written on 5 Oct ’14}
tender thoughts; 