Rain
"The sound of the ocean, captured in a shell, like a memory."
Sheets pulled up to my chin, I see his prettypink lips open and close with a soon-to-be evanescent dream and the bronzen plane of his chest rise and fall with breath. Slow. Steady. Everything that I am not.
I close my eyes and smile.
"Have you ever wondered," he says and sighs. Brown eyes open to watch him. "…What it would be like to remember everything?"
I take in his blonde hair and eyes the color of amethysts (eyes that watch me back), and I think that if I remembered how to cry, I would have.
I lean over him. Point to the window, where rain pitpitpangs against the glass. "Do you hear that?" I say. "What if…What if every drop was a memory? Can you distinguish between every single one?"
He shakes his head and smiles. "No," he says, as if he understands, even though we both know that he doesn't. But it doesn't matter, I think, not to me.
My fingers lace in his hair and as I kiss him, I say, "Let me put it this way. Nothing means anything, nothing makes sense except for right now, and you."
He smirks into the cocoon of our kiss and I remember thinking that nothing tastes better than somebody else's smile in your mouth.
I figure that once I remember how to cry, I will remember how to love, too. I might even be happy.
The rain grows louder when he says, "But don't you want to remember the good things, if not the bad?" He pulls my wrist to his lips, as if he wants to brush the purple rivers that run beneath the pallid skin.
Tomorrow, we will be fighting, like always. Complaints will be punctuated with shouts, and shouts with screams. That used to be my reason for forgetting.
But right now, he is watching the thoughts that rush behind chocolate eyes, and he smiles against my wrist because he knows he is right. I want to know how to cry and laugh and love and I want to harvest every tap against the window pane, or at least this one and all the ones like this that come before and after.
I am wondering if I love this boy.
(I am wondering if it even matters.)
He kisses me again, and then I touch the wet apples of my cheeks. My fingers are cool when my breath rushes over them, and I place them on my tongue.
Warm. Salty. I am crying.
He smiles at me, kisses me again, and I am crying and laughing and loving between lips that are so familiar with abusing and being abused. I don't know what is mine and what is his, but it doesn't matter, because tears are falling from my eyes.
They are falling warm and new. But comfortable. Like rain.