While the sun sets, the silhouettes of trees forming a natural swampy skyline fly past, ancient and towering. Yet the sun glowing orange sits stationary, silently warming me with lingering rays filtering through the branches, solitary and unshakeable, even as it dips below the horizon, dappling my skin with an ever changing pattern of light. Scratchy folk music wafts through the air in waves emanating from the radio of Your pick-up, and taking a calculated breath, I sigh.
We met again for the first time in years on the cusp of a huge boom in the music scene in our little county. I have become a bonified band-aid tailing my friends and their bands from shitty venues to dusty garages to white trash neighborhood backyards. And my sharp tongue and snappy personality has become quite renowned among the scene. Fluttering about like a butterfly in colorful vintage dresses and soda-pop can ring necklaces jingle jangling about my neck, hovering about in the Floating World on cigarette smoke and laughter.
I stopped by Your garage on a hot day around 1 after work with a friend coming to visit a band mate of Yours during practice. Your name, so familiar to me repeated across my brain countless times since I learned it is suddenly connected to Your face as my eyes adjust to the darkness of your garage as I enter from the bright burning noontide sky. There is sweat on the back of my neck and I'm wearing something old but I forget everything as memories of You flood back into my head. Old gray memories that have frayed at the edges but whose images still retain an accurate likeness to their counterparts in the real world.
And it is apparent that We are going to happen, that there exists that bond between Us that has tied Us together through the years and the centuries and the millenia and through all of time and space.
I am shy at first, so very uncharacteristic. But I have been waiting for this moment for 8 years, 17 years, thousands of years, and am not about to begin fucking around.
You are inexplicably handsome. Boys and girls alike notice it, acknowledge it, and yet you have a certain subdued dynamic, you fade in with the crowd, even though you do not walk among them. You laugh with some hardcore kids from a couple towns over who are high and toting ill-gotten forties, sleeves rolled up to Your elbow, strong, graceful fingers grasping a bottle leisurely. I flash a vaguely naughty smile, which You return, and I know You read into it because I can feel Your eyes on my back as I wade through the crowds charming the masses. And I can feel the tension between us surrounding you like a cloud, a tangible atmosphere that I can feel, flowing from your body and rising up into the night, mixing with the moths and the golden lamp light and the blue night.
Sweet, wonderful, lo-fi plays over the crowd, a mixture of shitty stereo and bad recording but it sounds beautiful all the same to me. And as I talk to a group of kids that went to my high school that are now punk rock, I feel Your hand, Your fingers lightly touch my shoulder. The slightest hint of electricity ignites my skin. There are tons of guys that are into me and girls into you. But time slows down when I turn and our eyes meet, and some hippie girls exhale cherry-apple hookah smoke from their lungs and some guys from the other side of town toss shots of So-Co to the back of their burning throats.
We leave together later that night, laughing, slightly tipsy. The party is still quite lively even though it is late. A few people we know shoot us naughty, knowing glances, and I smile and stick out my tongue coyly. Clumsily tripping over my feet a little, You open the passenger door for me laughing, and Your hands keep on slipping up, touching me, too soon, too soon. I grab them, yet don't remove them; but flash a smile that yearns for You to wait just a little bit longer.
We live more on the outskirts by the old forest, and I see that same skyline of trees, this time in reverse, the moon and stars replacing the sun in a blanket of dark blue as they sparkle and fly behind the ancient branches. Your old house looms in the distance, and I almost don't want to leave the car, You beside me, a foot or two away from my body. There are lights on, but they are just your younger siblings, staying up with the freedom that their summer vacation allots them engrossed in the loud jabbering and blaring lights of an old television set.
We laugh, me hanging onto Your arm for support, and tumble up the stairs. You flick on the light of your lamp, dim, but still warm. The window is open and the summer air fills the room. And as we lay on your bed in the light, our hands searching each other fervently, mouths eagerly tasting, tears stream down my cheeks and soak into your old comforter as I feel all of your love both emotionally and physically coming down onto me. I feel it all, everything, so powerfully, so poignantly. The fibers of your sheets, the fine prints of your fingers on my skin, the light glowing red behind closed eyes, the hot night enveloping us.
And I know, this is the greatest moment of my entire life.
