warring pieces

I promised myself I would blog more.

And I will, honestly, once I find something sufficiently interesting to blog about, but for now there’s just this:

You meet him when you are ten and he is almost eleven. He points this out to you a lot, along with how small and ineffectual your fists are. You don’t care, you don’t care— if you are in love with anyone, it is his older brother, who has bangs that fall over his forehead in a perfect fan and the smile of a matinee idol.

You can’t even say his name properly. That fact makes you hate him, just a little more.

When you are young, all boys are monsters, and the boys who will grow up to break your heart are the most odious of all. He is a monster, ohhh he is, he is.

You get thrown together on more than one occasion, because he is cute, and face it, you are cuter. You make such a pretty picture together, all blushes and precocious bravado, and his arm resting across your shoulders, his thumb just brushing your collarbone.

You are so young— you cannot know that years later, fingers across the same spot will burn electric, and that desire will make you its slave. Instead, after the photo is taken, you throw his arm off your shoulder and run away, a terrible fist around your heart. You ignore him calling after you.

You will ignore him for a long time. This will not be deliberate. A birthday forgotten, a petty humiliation remembered, an invitation unsent in the mail. Memories between you crumbling like fine dust falling in an hourglass.

You are too different, you say, when you finally remember. He likes dancing and hip-hop music, and judging from his pictures on his website— pale girls with long brown hair and bad grammar. There is nothing as annoyinginfuriatingpainful as seeing someone whose arms you could have made your home wrapping them around someone else.

You have darkdark hair shorn short like a punishment, and skin brown from your sun-soaked activities. You like books and funny movies and sad music sung by girls with guitars, and you would never have expected that scrawny boy to grow up into a man you could have possibly let into your life.

Sometimes you will think of him, but only briefly, when the nights are long and the winters longer. There are other arms across your shoulders now, other voices pointing out how small your hands are, as they catch them in bigger fists that will never hold your heart.

Total fiction butofcourse. For me (mostly), but also for Reese.