Thinking about you, cruising the halls unseen, unheard as if you were imagined from perfection because how else would you exist?
Thinking about you here, in my seat in Maths,
while the teacher drones on and on about algebraic nonsense that no one can decipher without asking,
"Sir... in English, please"
The class is all composed of hushes and murmurs,
notes going every which way until papers are fully masked and the pencils all but spent.
I think about how this pattern will continue for as long as high school is said to pass quickly yet slothlike.
The bell rings, I walk to my locker on the corner of the dusty school I think I heard your soft laugh and felt the accidental embrace as you passed me by, only to vanish into the thin air I swore I created you from.
Grabbing my books, I close the locker door and straighten my uniform, my hair,
the glasses that somehow went askew in the most obvious sense.
Suddenly you're in front of me, calling my name, asking if I want help.
I am about to speak when I blink, and again you vanish as if you were a hologram.
Onward to the next class with me. I am in the back, but get moved to the front.
"Sitting so far back isn't going to help your learning, dear," chides the matronly teacher.
Class begins with the usual spiel about subjunctives, demonstratives, indicatives and superlatives,
and again my mind makes you sit next to me, copying my notes whilst sending secret messages.
Shaking my head, I realize I almost dozed off, and I find a stack of worksheets to pass down the row.
I ask to be excused, as I need to perhaps get some fresh air or fetch a pen I'd forgotten.
En route to the courtyard, via the long, narrow hallway that makes some claustrophobic,
I hear in the silence, your slow steps and gentle halt at the height of the steps.
Uncautioned I walk until I see your shadow cover me.
You do not move. I do not look up to meet your eyes. Instead, I mumble a hello so as not to be perceived as a lunatic by an passer-by.
To my surprise, however, I feel a soft touch on the base of my chin,
a flat, harmless hook lifting my face up to look at the eyes that so mirror my own.
We stand in silence until I inch myself slowly into your waiting arms,
already short without the extra steps under your school shoes.
You slide your hand down the back of my head, and every thought dispells.
If I'm asleep now, I'm horridly afraid to wake up.
A moment later, you whisper kindly,
"Are you skipping class"
I shake my head no, and defend, "I needed to see you, and it's only my first day"
You chuckle as you slide your hand around my shoulders. I blush in reaction.
"I've missed you too"
I am silent as I realize that I should be back with my alibi of a pen, at least. But let you go, I cannot.
However, begrudgingly, you can.
"You should go back," you say as you slowly retreat your arms from me. I shake my head but you won't have it.
"I'll walk you there, if you'd like," you offer, but I shake my head in small shakes and wave.
I wake up to the sound of my name and the sound of the bell for the last morning class. I sigh.
As the locker in the corner comes into view, I think I see a note; but when I pick it up, it is blank.
I discard. The locker door is opened to replace my books with a sack for clothes I don't care much to wash.
This class I get by, usually exempt due to unarguable reasons about my health conditions.
But today I play to forget the stupor I'm in, with little success, because when the coach laughs, his eyes crinkle,
exactly the way yours do when you're smiling from your depths.
I hallucinate again and see you in the place of a 45-year-old man who's graying. I blink, and you're gone again.
I find myself in the glass room after a lunch block spent picking at a sandwich I've lost taste for.
The room fills with multicoloured fluids, some of which explode when mixed either correctly or incorrectly.
Mine is a beautiful sapphire blue, which with just an eyedrop of the purple, flares up into an angry red,
the exact shade of your lips when they're not chapped or just very moisturized.
Afterwards I have donned an apron and am wielding a clean painbrush, ready to dress a bare canvas.
Try as I might to think of something, I see you in front of me, white dress shirt off,
revealing healthy pallour even more enticing than the canvas. I force myself to look away,
but when I look back, I see that I've painted a faint outline of your face and body shrugging off the shirt,
invisible to all who had to adjust their eyes to an endless line of cool grey tempera paint.
I'm in the kitchen now, helping the old woman teach how to get jam stains out of white shirts by hand.
She doesn't believe washers are practical, as she is still planted in the 1940s.
She scrapes the shirt against the washboard. I don't hallucinate this time, except I remember how you complained about jelly stains from pastries no matter how small.
I tell myself that that was a low blow, but myself says I started it.
Finally the day is through, and I decide that I am through. With school. This school, at least.
I am about to smash myself against my locker door to fight back the tears that threaten but don't deliver,
when suddenly the hallways clear as I was the only person in here all day. Like everything had been a lie.
And then, by a very pathetic fallacy, light shines from the high windows and I see you looking at me from twenty paces away.
My breath catches as I try to pinch myself. No muscle spasm comes. We only look at each other, you and I,
as if the times have changed so much despite the shortness of it all.
You only look at me, your mouth somber but illusioning a wan smile my way. My own mouth is a minuscule o. The sunlight creeps my way from behind you, and I swear you don't cast a shadow, until it touches my left foot.
Your hand reaches, your shadow a string puppet, and you touch my face. As far as you are, I feel your fingertips.
And now you walk slowly to me, and yet you walk with a slick that speeds you up a bit.
I step forward as delicately as I can, and I find we are face to face, and then hand in hand.
One high school day soon turns into four years later that we are together again.
The longest day was that first day in high school, because it was multiplied by 365 and exponentialixed, all in one BEDMAS equation that compressed it more when it was scientifically notified.
In my best form of prose, the day was worth as much pain as giving birth, though I am still far too young to know.
I seem to have been running away from my fears, but I managed to take something of yours with me;
a trinket, perhaps? Or a glove?
The chemistry I start to notice now was always so potent that it could have burned us alive. Now I've caught up,
and it very well can.
The beauty your face has right now, my hands would be lucky to trace, given the slight impediment they bear.
And to think... I was trying to smudge you out simply for the sake of moving on.
High school.
It hadn't begun until that day, when that day became four years of the same torturous thoughts, degrees varied.
Middle school was all well and good, but the memory of high school, now over for us both, always was the same thoughts without you, a horrible nightmare not painful, but silently traumatic.
We walk outside, hand in hand, wherever the forgotten future leads. We have much to catch up on.