but is my love transitory?

i was laid out across her couch as the minutes crawled

closer to midnight—each one with their collective mouths

agape, the minutes: small teeth bared, eyes wide, wide,

wider, watching my heart try to claw its way through a

tiny exit wound in my chest. in the stuffy air of her living

room i listened to her breathing; soft, unassuming—the

shape of her existence looming even in sleep, a willow

that brushed its skeletal limbs over me like a ghost in

perpetual passing.

this is not to say she was withered or atrophied. she

carried herself as such; everything about her mannerisms

pointed to the burden of being seen, and sometimes late at

night she would slip me fragments of a disjointed

childhood as if they were secret notes wrapped delicately

in napkins, blanched corners tidy, filed down clean to the

bone.

truthfully, she was the most fervent person i had ever met.

i couldn’t tell her. i couldn’t tell her half of what i wanted

to say. there’s an undisclosed terror in lifting the veil

from the face of being in love with your best friend. and

back then, i didn’t think i’d ever been in love, not in a

way that mattered. back then, the love i gave was weaker

than the love i was expected to hold. back then i was

starting to understand i was different and it was an

augmentation i didn’t want her to see.

at the same time, i was terrified of being left behind at the

altar of everything her and i had built.

sometimes i wonder why it frightened me so much. i

don’t remember much of my childhood—out of sight, out

of mind—yet i have become quite close with my inner

child over the years and, back then,

before i had memorized the shape of love as a light warm

and soft enough to hold, sometimes she would stand on

the tips of her toes, straining in her scuffed white

sneakers to reach my ear, and between giggles she would

tell me things that i could not yet hear. when i realized

the dangerous line i’d begun to walk with my best friend

—a grin stretched stupidly over my face as i peeked over

the precipice—the distant voice of my inner child would

goad me on.

i like her too! i like her too!

my best friend slept, face turned into the couch cushions,

and i studied her features like a moron. pools of almond

kissed her lower eyelids in a way that i could not. her

eyelashes were long and dark and casted shadows over

her cheeks, and i wondered if she was dreaming. if she

was dreaming i hoped she was somewhere kinder,

somewhere that treated her the way it should’ve.

her apartment felt too hot all of a sudden. something

ghosted over my skin as if it was making to crawl inside,

and i couldn’t imagine anything worse than that. for a

sobering moment, i wondered what parts of me it would

change. what parts it would tear apart.

i peeled myself away from the cage of warmth we’d

created. a part of me always stayed wrapped around her,

dumbly hesitant to leave, drinking down those lonesome

moments between us like earthy tree sap because it was

all i could afford to take for myself.

(i’m a selfish animal at my core. my teeth are too sharp. i

hate the thought of hurting others yet when i’m

overwrought my first instinct is to bite whatever stands

stillest.)