Tell me why, that when I first met you, my gut didn’t burst out of my stomach or my heart from my breast. I saw you under the dim lighting of the fluorescents, and I thought you might be someone interesting to talk to. Nothing more. And then, the next time, my heart skipped a beat when you hugged me close. I saw you a few more times after that, and then the summer came and I didn’t hear from you anymore. But I thought about you constantly. In those few, precious times that we were together, my attraction to you grew. When I had that first conversation with you on the phone- the first ever from a boy- I didn’t want to hang up. We talked for an hour and a half, and I could have listened to the sound of your laughter all night long. The fact that you had a girlfriend didn’t really cause me hindrance- not as long as I didn’t see her.

When you went away for the summer, to wherever it is you went, you took with you my plans. This was to be the long, three month period where I let myself be free and have fun. I was about to turn seventeen, after all. I wanted to flirt with boys and be confident. My friends joked around that a boy couldn’t hold my attention for more than an hour, the very reason I remained perpetually single. I was going to go to the summer dances and hang out with cute guys, flip my hair over my shoulder like the idiotic girl I wanted to be, if only for a little while. That was the only thing I wanted from life. And you took it away. I tried my hardest to not cling to the fact that you were the first boy I ever related to so easily. Maybe it was just your nature, to be that way with everyone… But would that be so bad? It was a confusing argument, and one that I thought about more often than not. I flushed every single time a song came on the radio that reminded me of you. I couldn’t stop thinking about when you asked me to slow dance- also my first one. With guys, I’d always learned to be guarded and keep a safe distance intimately. Maybe that was a fault of mine, but one I couldn’t help. With you, though, I don’t know if the walls ever went up.

Your smile remained in my memory, and I called upon it often. A guilty pleasure. I knew you would be in school with me that year, and I waited for it with excitement and fear. I wanted to see you again before the summer ended. So fleeting was our friendship that I sometimes questioned the substantiality- had I romanticized you or were you real after all? I couldn’t help but think of you when someone mentioned the tiniest detail in conversation that could be traced to your name. Eventually, though, I became frustrated with myself. You weren’t here, and my imagination was only so good. Couldn’t I have some fun until I saw you again? I tried hard for the second half of my summer… I tried to flirt with other guys, talk to them like I wasn’t thinking about you in the back of my mind. But on the inside, the compliments would turn to dust in my throat, and I couldn’t say them. A strange impatience would take over me when a new boy came to talk to me- when was he going to leave? Didn’t he know I wasn’t interested? And then they all left me alone. I finished out my summer in an eager desperation to see you again, to talk to you. I needed either to find my feelings for you were true or that you were just an image I’d blown up and molded to my own liking. Both options offered a strange relief.

The first day of school was a hard thing to handle. I did see you, but when we talked, I only saw a glimmer of the boy you’d been this summer. Some of the closeness was gone, replaced by a buddy-buddy vibe. Unfortunately, I was hardwired to respond in the same way. Now, almost two months after that day, I barely know you. That friendliness, which was lesser than at the blooming freedom, slowly shrank into what it was now- the occasional acknowledgement, a hand gesture, and a lot of staring. I know you watch me, just as I watch you. I never found out if you still had a girlfriend, but that didn’t matter. You treated me different, even from the first day, than you acted towards your other female pals. A sense to know why burns inside of me, sometimes as small as an ember, other times as big and vast as a wildfire. You changed me, somehow, in both good and bad ways. At the beginning of the summer, I knew it was you who I needed to be with. I held this in my mind with an utter confidence that I would only be with you or no one. Now it is a sad confirmation, because I still believe it.

Some days you make me angry, so I don’t even look at you anymore. Other times, I feel sad and nostalgic, and I smile at you shyly. The responses you provide are mixed, but always with the same distance. I’m hoping that we stop being lost in a sea of uncertainty soon. I want us to float back to that mystical place of the summer, and start over from the beginning. I want the pounding of my heart to be the sole and core emotion, breaking free of the disparity and sickening turmoil that come with it.

I just want you, the boy I used to know.