Satin

He ran his hand across my cheek, he was the only thing I could see. This was both a metaphor and an actuality. A metaphor because no matter where we went I couldn’t take my eyes off him. And an actuality because when he laid on top of me he blocked out my view of everything behind him.

He had these deep cerulean blue eyes that looked as if they were the setting for 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. His eyes had this gravitational pull that dragged you in and drowned you in them. I’m not entirely sure whether they were like a soft mid-summer day’s rain or a thick brewing summer typhoon. They were soft in the sense that, if you saw them when he thought no one was looking, they had this kind look to them, this sort of cooling warmth. However, when he thought people were looking they brought in storm clouds, lightning crackled throughout his iris’,thunder followed it, bashing and booming. However, if you looked hard enough and stared through the din, you saw it, the eye of the storm, the calmest part. Much like his his eyes, his facial features were strong and pointed and jutted out of his face like river rapids. His nose was long and sloping and defined the profile of the rest of his face. His chin was like a greek Acropolis, defined when looked at as a whole but up close soft and gradual. His collar bones were thin but defined and shot out of his shoulders like someone had displaced the rockies, and made his torso their new home. He painted a beautiful landscape in front of me, a entire world was flourishing and growing right before my eyes.

Leaning down, he began to kiss me, melting the two of us together into a single harmony. He merged his world into mine creating a single unity between the two of us. I felt our hearts beginning to beat as one, playing the tune to a song that only the two of us knew. The song was slow, sultry jazz music. If you were to hear it, it would take you through time and place you in a nightclub in the 20s. A live singer would jostle about the stage in a long red dress. Her voice would be smooth and rich and would fill everyone of your senses with the time period, at least the romanticized aspects of it. You would taste it, hear it, smell it, it would consume your entire being until you wouldn’t be unable to escape. That’s what I’ve noticed about him, it’s not his eyes that has a gravitational pull but him himself, everything about him was mesmerizing.

As we grew together I felt chills rise out of my back like mountains, fires lit beneath my tongue, volcanoes began to rise in my stomach as vines wrapped around my ribs and lungs tightening my entire chest. Violets bloomed beneath my eyes and underneath my fingernails. In between my teeth, stars exploded and then from the stardust thousands more formed where the old ones once were. As we became one, he was turning me into a world of my own, painting me with the colors found inside of him. He had turned me into my own little corner of his galaxy.

All I could feel, was satin. Soft, red, satin. I remember it was the first thing I noticed when I walked into the room. He told me he had bought the sheets special for this occasion and I remember how special I felt. On the bed rose petals were scattered about, I hardly noticed them on the red satin and probably wouldn’t have if he didn’t tell me. Maybe this is all too idealistic sounding and maybe it’s supposed to be. Clichés are painful, love is messy, the world doesn’t have defined lines.

My heart was racing, the world was spinning, my vision was blurry. The world around me had never looked so beautiful before. He was a mixture of Satin, of rose petals, of… me. The entire world seemed to beat with my heart. We had both grown into one world together and now we began to turn the real world into our own. We painted the walls red, and blue and green and yellow and every other shade and hue of color we could find within ourselves, within our beating, living hearts. We were two boys with sad eyes that had enough color inside ourselves to turn the four small white walls into an entire galaxy. Nebulas swirled around us, shooting stars whizzed in between us, asteroids floated through the room. We had both became stars in the same constellation in that moment and no force in the universe could pull us apart.

Eventually, he rolled over and laid next to me in the bed. He interlocked his fingers with mine and we just looked at the room before us. We admired the beautiful world we had just created together, two mortal beings taking on an immortal task. We sat in silence in this universe. It was so pretty that we did not want to speak, fearing that our voices would cause it to bend and break and snap and ultimately disappear.

Then suddenly, he spoke.

“I think I love you…”

My heart stopped. My fear was right, the sound of his voice did cause the entire universe to bend, break and snap. Everything around me started to crumble before my very eyes. We had built our kingdom and now I destroyed it in fear. What was I afraid of? Was I afraid of my feelings? Afraid of being hurt? I wasn’t sure then and frankly I’m not sure now, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be.

I felt the mountains of my spine turn in landslides and mud. My tongue began burn as volcanoes went off in my stomach burning the vines wrapping around my ribs. My lungs filled with smoke and tightened, my heart practically stopping. The violets began turn brown the petals falling off one by one, both of us dying in that moment. The stars between my teeth collapsed in on themselves and began to suck my entire body into them, turning myself into a black hole, sucking everything and everyone around me into darkness.

All I could feel, was satin. Soft, red, satin. All I could see was satin. All I could hear satin. Satin, satin, satin, it filled up all of my senses, drowned my pores in it, making it feel as if my skin was about to turn into it, the world around me was wrapped in Satin. I was wrapped in Satin. We were wrapped in red, soft, satin.

The twenties were over, the music had stopped. Cliches are painful, love is messy and the world doesn’t have defined lines and I’m not sure I do either.

“Oh…” he said, my silence being enough of an answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, or enjoy his presence but… love him? Love is such a strong word, it’s a real word and that’s always been a big fear of mine, real. Love puts “fragile” stickers on relationships, and I have never been found of people thinking I’m fragile.

“L-L-listen… It’s just…” I started but he began getting out of bed.

“No… it’s fine really I just don’t think I should be here right now…” he said quickly getting dressed. My heart hurt. Bad. I wanted to stop him, I wanted to tell him I loved more than I love getting to wake up every morning, I wanted to say I’m sorry for having to think about it. Actually -no- it’s not that I wanted to say that, it’s that I wished I wanted to say that. But the truth is, I didn’t. I want to tell him I like him a lot but I don’t know if I’m ready for love. I’ve always been a little scared of that too. Sometimes I’ll forget that if I do get married one day, it will be to a boy, how could I forget I liked boys? People forget things from 10 years ago because it was ten years ago, but people forget things from today because they don’t want to remember.

But right now, that’s not the story I’m telling, we will touch on that topic in a different story at a different time with a different person.

Right now I’m telling the story of how I watched someone destroy his own world. Paint a picture and then burn it because he was afraid of being good at something. It’s okay to be good at something.

We haven’t spoke since that day. I wish I could tell you that we had and I wish I could tell you I realized I loved him more than the moon loves the stars. But the moon is just a rock and can’t love and what if I can’t either? Maybe this story is unfinished but I’m only a teenager, to tell finished stories would be to die young.