Say you're Kenny and you're in math class. Except math class is boring, so you're not in math class. Technically you are, but you're not technical. You're infatuated with another boy in the classroom. 2nd row, 4th desk. You have it memorized.
His hair is pitch black and it looks more like black seaweed, wet and soft, than anything else. You haven't felt it, but you imagine that's what it feels like. You've got nothing to do (kindly disregarding the actual work, you couldn't care less about functions) and so you take to doodling, keeping your eyes on the black haired boy, switching your gaze between his hair and your paper. Black, white, black, white, black, white, pale?
Oh.
He's looking at you.
Staring intently, rather, and you partake in this staring contest, while the teacher drones on about why x can't possibly be larger than y and you're sure y must feel very bad, being so small, and you kind of feel like y.
Say you're Kenny and you're in math class and your eyes are set on another pair of eyes 5 desks away from you. His narrow. Yours widen. Absentmindedly, he licks his left canine and you bite your lip and he's staring at you and the teacher is painfully immersed in the story of x and its love affair with z and y's inferiority complex. You're more focused on figuring out if this boy, named Craig Tucker, has green or brown eyes.
Making eye contact, you read somewhere, makes everyone, not just yourself as you first assumed, grow anxious. And your stomach feels like a centrifuge and you're sure they're not green.
Craig has brown eyes.
The teacher stands in front of his desk, considering he has to turn his back to her to look at you, and huffs. He grins at you and rolls his eyes and turns back.
"What's back there that's so interesting?" the professor lectures and her mouth becomes the thinnest line you've ever seen.
"Kenny," he deadpans and you sink into your chair. Too late, she's looking at you.
Her eyes squint and she gestures at you.
"You two," she spits, "out."
You let out a chuckle (you're already getting kicked out from math class, might as well) and grab yours and Craig's bag and walk outside. He follows you and snatches his backpack.
"You know," he says in his nasally voice and you wonder if he has a chronic cold or if he just sounds like that naturally, "I could've just said 'nothing'," and he runs his hands through his messy hair.
"Yeah," you're no Shakespeare, but you can get the point across, "I could've not stared at you."
"Same here," he says and you leave the school and go to this weird, secluded area where, he tells you this as you walk, he goes sometimes to smoke or read.
You sit down on the half-wall and he pulls out his math notebook and starts to doodle.
"I always do this when the teacher's being boring," he admits, "AKA all the time."
You chuckle.
His notebook's filled with dinosaurs and sheep and dead trees and he's drawing this infinite line of this one blob you think looks like the end result of the time you tried to make pancakes. You point it out.
"We should name it," he says to you, "let's call it…"
When he's thinking, he taps his pen on his jawline.
"Infinicakes."
You agree on the name and he doodles some more infinicakes and you twiddle your thumbs and watch him and the way his eyes grow larger when he looks up and the way his smile goes more to his left and the way his nose scrunches up when he's annoyed.
You watch him.
The bell rings and you walk back into the school for your next class and wonder about how the leaves fall from the trees, land on the ground, how nature sheds during the fall and how the snow covers every trace of summer. You wonder about these simple things, and then about what others think about.
If they think about boys and girls, their hair, their grades, going out. You're not fazed by these teenage issues. Your struggles are more childish, misunderstood and ignored, deemed tiny and irrelevant because they're so childish. Your struggles aren't related to school or friends or your future (hell, you have no idea what you're gonna do a week from now, let alone a year), no. Yours are different, floating about in the void of existence.
You're not in love with Craig, no, it's… it's so much simpler. Too complicated to explain, though. No, Craig isn't a crush or a boyfriend or something dumb like that, he's… a person you enjoy spending time with. A person you'd like to kiss every day and go fight monsters with.
You figure a relationship, being in love, that's too serious, too much of a responsibility, you need something more relaxed. No anniversaries, no Valentine's day gifts (well you got him a card last year, but that's beside the point), no dates.
Just sitting on benches, and holding hands, and spray painting genitals on vehicles, and video games and pizza on a Monday night. Spontaneous and casual kissing and sleeping on each other when it's cold outside.
School ends and you go to his house and it starts raining and his parents ask him about his day but he just guides you up to his room. He sits by his window, stares at the rain, turns to you and goes:
"We're kinda like this, aren't we?" he points outside, "tiny drops of rain, falling till we fall."
Falling till you fall.
You ponder what he just said and nod, sitting on his bed and falling back, you stare at the ceiling.
"Falling till we fall," you repeat.
"Maybe," and you hear his finger squeak against the glass, "we'll catch on a window."
"Maybe," you agree.
"And slide down it until we met the end."
"That would be the fall, though, wouldn't it? Hitting the glass?"
"Maybe."
He watches the rain in silence and you count the shapes on his ceiling and you live, in that speck of reality, you wonder how unlikely it is to be anything at all.
In the midst of all the important events in the universe, it's still raining and you're still in his room, staring at the ceiling and the rain, sneaking glances at each other.
Falling till you fall.