It’s been two years yet you’re the only one I want to talk to. I want to tell you everything. I want to tell you about the night we almost kissed in lush Peru, seventh grade, among tropical flowers and the scent of vacation and your father inside your hotel room with the window flung open and guitar music flowing from the bar. It was like a dream. I remember circling the building, a peculiar orangey-brown stucco surrounded by long, wet blades of green, thinking or perhaps making up stories. But all of it was about you. Somehow I didn’t want you to see my walking around, even though you knew my room was right down the hallway from yours—like the trip leader had planned it. We were the two little puppy-love lovebirds of the group, after all. Still, you spotted me and waved like a puppy would if, of course, puppies could wave. Minute-ish hours had passed since you and I had sat in the garden, my feet resting on the glass table as you looked at my iPod, neither of us daring to touch the other. I said, let’s take a walk. I said, I have to show you something. You said, okay. Your face told me you loved me. We ring-around-the-rosie’d the building and spied on our respective parents. We laughed and talked and it was easy. I kept thinking, kiss me now. Is he going to kiss me now? Kiss me now. A first kiss. Kiss me now. A command. My thoughts incoherent, incohesive. We stopped by a door to the back of the stucco building. There was a door there, and a window, and a window of opportunity for you to kiss me. The window closed. I said, I’m tired. I’m hungry. I said, my mom’s probably wondering where I am. You said, same with my dad.
I remember you now. Even after these two years catharsis trying to rid my system of the disease of you. I wonder if you remember me the way you thought I was. You think I’m terrible now—a disease too. All I think is that you should’ve kissed me. Two years later, I don’t want anyone else. Two years later, a January night, a year since hey, it turns out boys don’t wait for you. Can we go back to Peru?