How long can you ignore your feelings?

When a crush hits you like a truck, and suddenly instead of sleeping soundly, you're awake at 3am listening to her breathing, there's a distinct agony in the ignorance.

Discipline is required to maintain the socially acceptable distance between you and a girl who seems oblivious. Rightly so - you'll be damned before you tell her how you feel.

Hell is like a headache, compared to the migraine of this mistake.

If your love for her is a manifesto, let this be the lead line: you're fucked.

Your policies are thus: ignore it, it'll go away.

But that's what they told you when you came out, and everybody knows you can't pray the gay away. Keep the crucifixes quiet and wipe away the holy water - religion has no place in the silent riot of this romance. The lore is on your side if you say aye.

Optimism is cute, you tell yourself, but this ship is sinking.

Tie yourself to the mast all you like.

The sirens have sung and you followed every call, only to find that there's nothing under this sea but more sand and a bunch of other bodies. History is a mere hitch, at this point.

Like the proverbial unilateral university indefatigable infatuation: She's. Not. Interested.

Later, you learn that "sanguine" means both "bloody" and "hopeful". How applicable.

In the interim, you notice something cat-like about her coyness; the feline in her fuckery.

"I have to keep some of my secrets", she says. Her sibilance makes you somnolent.

The little comments that might normally be cast aside - "sorry cutie", she smiles - suddenly start to loiter just inside your ears, as though the line delivered hasn't quite been digested yet.

It's ever present, just like the notion of her.

Footsteps outside your door? Somebody else, but your heart still hammers.

A change in proxemics (and consequently your body temperature) is meaningless, you know; a moment of madness induced by the slightest shuffle of feet.

The shift in dynamics between you both is almost imperceptible, and to everybody outside your tiny bedroom, it is as though nothing changed at all.

But you know it. And she knows it.

You realise that the heartache you've been dragging - like the ball and chain you wish she were - wasn't misplaced after all. Those little taunts and teases weren't bluffs. You were back on the playground, having your pigtails tugged by a kid whose name you didn't know.

But you know now.

It's oh so clear: you walk away and her gaze follows you. She flirts and you catch it, but only just, and only after she's long gone. You find that you're making excuses to talk to her, to touch her. You're surprised that she seems to be doing the same.

You're scared; wary at best, but she seems to reciprocate each anxious foible, awkward fumble.

She mirrors your mumbles until every minute feels like that too-long time before a first kiss.

You're waltzing with words, lazy with lips, and even though she's messier than a morgue in a Hallowe'en special, she's worth it.

Then, when she leaves - although not of her own volition - you're lost.

Cast once more upon the waves, as Byron said, but this is one femme fatale you're chipper to chase, fervent to fetch. Bring me my longboat, you think. I'm bringing this girl aground.

Days pass. Battle plans, although drawn, remain redacted. You have withdrawn from the world.

A fluke, a freak of nature, and she's back in your arms, borne from the body of another.

Sentences are incomplete - she's closing the distance the moment she comes round - you stumble and stammer - she's crossing the room - and before you finish your phrasing, you are kissing her, and her tongue is not as curt as her manner might imply.

You are locking lips, literally, and this is one key that nobody else will ever find.

"We have to keep some of our secrets", you say.