I really do need you, you know. Your dark curly hair and your full lips, red like blood. The way you look down and up with your eyes, the funny dark hazel color, the flat brown of your hair, your pale skin. Pale like a vampire, or just someone who lives in Toronto.

I need to hear your voice, the soft scratchy school boy voice catching on all the tines in my life. All that emotion you manage to pack into one stuttered word. When you speak, the whisper in my ear, the call across the valley, I feel the chill.

I don't know what it is or when it happened, when I decided I couldn't live without you. I go to you like the alcoholic to his beloved bottle, the junkie with the heroin bubbling on a spoon. Sometimes the anticipation of seeing you is just as good as seeing you, sometimes it's better. Breathing the air in the room I know you'll soon be in. I can hardly speak.

When things are hard, when the tests are coming fast and furious I can imagine being with you, being on the top of my made bed, your hand slowly reaching for the buckle of my belt. Feeling your tongue with mine, feeling pulled and pushed on the current. Feeling something besides worry and the endless endless grind of these, these responsibilities. Oh, my possessions are owning me. I just want to own you.

I breathe you in like fresh air after being trapped in some dark cell, pulling against my chains. I'm always trapped if I can't be with you. Holding your hand in the halls, watching you lean against the locker, closing your eyes for a moment longer than a blink.

Endless winding space grind, I can't see an end despite the flat blue canvas sky today. I can feel anxiety like ants under my skin. It is everywhere. Are my grades good enough? Am I popular enough? Is this what I should be doing right now for where I want to go? I don't know. All I know is when I see you, that that's what I want. All I know is I don't feel like such a freak around you. I feel like the words coming out of my mouth are finally intelligible to someone. I feel like I could be all the me's trapped inside of me, that I could be who I always was around you. I could shed the lie. I could learn to fly. I could kiss you so deep your soul will ache. I could, could, touch you in a thousand places and still never learn them all.

So many times I don't know where I am. I go through my day on auto pilot, taking one step after the other just because I have to. You are the only light in my gray gun metal day. Little leaves unfurling now, springtime at last, this is how I feel. There is no way to describe it. I feel like the last coat of paint on the red wagon. The first drop of dew on the tallest blade of grass. All my levels seek you. I rise and fall to you.

It was scary for you to say you love me, but I was scared, too. Just because the words fell out of my mouth doesn't mean I knew what to do with them. It's like learning the words all over again. Lost in some Chinese translation. When I saw you I finally knew what they meant.