A/N: This is the first post in a series of many. I call them my blurbs, and I have a whole folder. They’re being edited. They’re not all from my perspective… in fact, few of the are even related to me. This is kind of how I try out new characters and situations to see if they’re feasible. It’s good fun, except for the fact that it’s become all I can do. Grr. Oh well, enjoy. P.S: Guess what this character is obsessed with…

Comic Book Romance.

Oh the joy of pretending that nothing’s real.

My life is a graphic novel. There are villains, there are heroes, sometimes both rolled into one. I can see the art, gradients shadowing the edges of the characters’ real, living flesh like faint pen and ink scars, in flashes like lightening. My dim, nearly unseeing eyes catch the things that the unsuspecting ignorant miss. My senses are heightened. I am Daredevil, I am Superman. Bat-teen.

You’re like the deluxe-color-gloss-finish edition to my black and white weekly. There are five names under ‘Pens’ in your header, six under ‘Ink’. You shine like cellophane. I am in awe. I sometimes wonder how you and I can even belong to the same story line, we’re so many worlds apart from each other. Maybe this is some sort of charity crossover.

Your lips slant upwards, the perfectly inviting, sloping slide of every young male’s fantasy land hostess. Everyone knows comic books are soft-core for juniors, pre-pubescent Playboy. You are their pouting pin-up, you’ve perfected the sultry sulky expression that makes everyone whisper “Nice, but unrealistic”. Except you are. Real.

I know for a fact that paper is stiff and cool and dry. Paper can’t kiss, paper isn’t warm beneath anxious fingers and paper does not leave a slightly sheen of residue on my own flat lips as it pulls away from them. If I were to run my tongue over the last place paper touched me, the most my taste buds would register would be sweat from my own skin and perhaps the faint metallic tang of ink. Whereas you, for all that you look like a creation meant to remain on the page, leave the taste of Spearmint gum and Raspberry Riot lip gloss. My lips, gloriously unpolished as if awaiting the transfer of goods from yours, wait all morning to drink thirstily from you.

I can write our every meeting like a script, one in which I stand waiting for the first sight of you for that beautiful moment when the people around us slow to a crawl— along with the particles of dust in the air and the music in my head—and you kiss me. Everything seems as if it’s trying to move through semi-melted beeswax and the motion lines disappear from behind the crowds as your carefully-inked image presses to me and your lips splash vibrant hues against my dull visage. Everything slows, except the beating of my heart, which drums out its onomatopoeic beat in block letters across my forehead.

THA-THUMP!

I write the story. My thought bubble. I draw the heroes, the villains. Nothing is real, and there is nothing that I can’t change. But your hands leave my sides of their own accord, and no matter how I will you back again, you never come, not until the next time. The story line skips, like a broken record, again and again over my heart. Your lips curve up at one corner, and you swivel on your heel, retreating, like the hero after the day has been saved. The wind catches your hair, your jacket, tossing them behind you in the wind like the robes of a sunshadowed superheroine. Will our hero get the girl? Tune in next issue.

And I always do.