Friday Flash Fiction: Remembrance of whole heartedness.

It may be fifteen years on. We may have only been children on the cusp of our adulthood but I remember; I remember the way your hand swept down my back and how you passed that invisible barrier, holding my cheek in the palm of your hand.

That was exactly were you had me all along.

I remember looking at you, under the sweep of my over massacred eyes and I wanted you in ways that were alien and beautiful. Even now, I recall the dress I was wearing and the feel of the thin vintage lawn cotton against my thighs. It was the time before vintage was cool.

I thought you were beautiful.

It was the school awards evening. You were down for the maths and science prize and I for English.

We had fascinated each other for months
.
My entire days were distracted, my life a complete pitching and heightening of emotions, based on a smile, a look, an accidental meeting. It was because of you that I failed – didn’t meet my glittering potential. Maybe if I had spent less time thinking of you, of the ways different light might fall on your naked body, or how you might look sleeping in the early hours of morning, I might have not spent so much time expecting.

I should have written less poetry, painted less paintings; read more text books.
Drank less Gin.

There were fleeting moments. Missed opportunities. I should have been bolder.

There was a night we drove one hundred and twenty miles down a winding country lane. I thought I was going to die. You laughed and turned the stereo up. It was the kind of night when the stars are screaming out their brilliance and everything has sharp edge to it. The same kind of edge as a knife – and as I ran my life down the edge of it, the thought of it all ending in a mangled crashing of our entwined bodies was sweeter than longevity.

I pushed towards the climax of our fate but you were somewhere else at that moment.

Two years into our exhausting, painful dance, you turned to the friend and said, “Please tell her I’ve loved her all along.”

That was the moment you finally broke me past healing.