By: Anonymous ‘25
It’s the way your bronze highlights flicker shyly in the sun amidst your coarse, brown hair. It’s the way we can’t decide who is taller, but either way, I’m at the perfect height to look directly into your eyes. It’s the way your clear glasses accentuate those warm, tender eyes, like a simple picture frame around a masterpiece. It’s the way even your acne is poetic, a love letter to the stars, a constellation that my finger traces gently across.
It’s the way your soul lights up when you spot a piano across the room and you dash to it like it might disappear if you don’t worship it in time. The way you sit down and let said piano open up to you and your fingers sprint and twirl and glide and push into the classic white and black keyes. The way you sway and breathe and rock as if the music is the wind and you are just a kite.
It’s the way you desperately pause the computer to explain the inconsistency in the color markings of the battle droids in our favorite Star Wars movie and how you “can’t believe they overlooked such an important detail.” The way I’ve never seen your room but I know that there are sixteen Marvel comic books hanging on your wall, stolen from your brother, and how the vinyl covers of your favorite Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra albums sit just below. It’s your carefully curated display case of fossils from various eras but also it’s all of the WWI helmets and badges and memorabilia that you love like they are your own children. It’s the way you sent a photo of the taxidermied birds that you saw in a Barcelona exhibit because their name reminded you of mine.
It’s the way that this summer has been addictive and I’m terrified of when I have to let go. To let go of the sun, of my home, of so much rest, of you. It’s the way that I am in a state of permanent smile when you smile or the way that I burst out laughing more times than I can count. It’s the way you talk fast and your brain is moving faster, so fast that our brains are firing off of each other, so in sync. It’s the way that you played love songs the first time that you sat on the bench of my old piano. It’s the way that the night we first met, we gossipped and bickered and babbled and confided for hours, so late that my dad had to actually set a curfew for the rest of the summer.
“This is casual, right?”
Or maybe it’s the way we don’t really talk much anymore.
Comments