You Breathe : Cold Strawberries

      

I’m sitting here on your desk, with my legs swinging down slightly. This is the closest I can bring myself to be. I look around your room and I realize that it is exactly as I imagined it. It is so you, so messy and organized and girlish and boyish and so neutral. So you.

 

       I turn back to you and I cannot decide whether you are beautiful or handsome. Or simply ethereal. Ethereal and ephemeral. Like the Little Prince’s Rose. But you are not my rose.

 

       Ethereal because you cannot be a boy or a girl, but you are beautiful and handsome at the same time that I am driven insane trying to categorize just who you are. But sometimes, I don’t bother. You are simply insanely attractive.

 

       Ephemeral because you are so frail, or so I believe. You have aged a lot during these years. I look at your pictures and realize that once upon a time you were a child too. Now, who is this tired but pretending-to-be-not woman who is gazing out of your eyes? You think too much, I believe that is your problem. But it is by your deep thoughts and great jumps of logic and startling conclusions that have gotten me breathless.

 

       The blankets have made their way half your body and you’re in a haphazard position. I keep silent, barely daring to breathe. You sleep so lightly that I fear that I might wake you with my mere thoughts. Your glasses lie on the bedside table, ready for you I assume, when you go to school tomorrow. Or perhaps to the doctors.

 

       You sleep like a child, the age in your face has blended well with the moonlight. The pain is less etched on your face as when you are awake. For a moment, I can pretend that you were just that child who dared to make fun of me. I can pretend I hated you again and wished you dead. I can pretend. But I choose not to.

 

       I turn away because my heart is beating too loudly. I sneak a peek at you and I imagine that you stir with the sound of my heart smashing itself against my ribcage in an effort to get to you, to touch you, to know you.

 

       Sweetly, gently, you have been in my life’s peripheral vision and now, at the end of all things, you have blazed brilliantly and blinded me. You are in focus now, if not the only thing seen whenever I walk down the halls.

 

       I never forgot you, from the day you couldn’t let me be part of your group. Just because I was older, just because you wrote better than me and you were more than a year younger. I never forgot the anger that blazed into a smoldering flame that demanded I grow better than you. A fire that defined what I wrote, what I felt. You angered me so much I wanted to defeat you.

 

       I had almost forgotten you and then you were there again, some other day. Talking to me just like an equal. You had forgotten about me. Most probably because I never really mattered to you then. But you mattered. You were everything I wanted to defeat.

 

       But now, you’re everything I wanted to have and wanted to stay away from.

 

       You are so distant, so frail, so beautiful (or handsome) like certain cold places in the world. Someplace we would like to go but really don’t. I wouldn’t want to have you. I wouldn’t want to have my illusion of you shattered as easily as the rest of my life was. I want you to be just like that.

 

       Like cold strawberries in the chiller rack of the supermarket.

 

       I know you’re sweet, perfect, divine. But I wouldn’t want to have to open the plastic to realize that there are some strawberries that will have bugs in them, or are bitter. Or are too soft.

 

       Stay in the chiller rack. Stay inside the invisible cling wrap of illusion.

 

       Stay at that distance.

 

       Stay.