The sting began in the root of my stomach. I stopped hearing the sway of his words and became sickeningly enthralled with the painful clash of his beautiful lips. Each rise and fall was like Samson’s final blow, replayed over and over and over again – it hurt.

When it was over, I tried my best to decode his unorthodox speech of:

“I still want to be with you but I had a life-changing experience while I was gone where I sat on a rock all night and carved my name into it and I just really need a friend now, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend!”

As I felt the sting trickle up my esophagus and settle down right in the back of my drying throat I asked him if he still wanted his present. “If you still want to give it to me,” he said.

Originally, it was going to be the most romantic action I’d ever preformed.

Originally, it was going to be magical and beautiful and we were going to smile and laugh and kiss and be together at last.

Originally, it was.

Realistically, it was never going to be.

We sat across from each other, me criss-cross apple sauce on the floor and him all raised and holy on the edge of my bed. I handed him the book and said:

“This is everything I wrote about you between the first day and now.”

He leafed through the pages dumbly. My ribs twitched.

“Is it full?”

“No.”

I don’t know whether he was relieved or surprised. Maybe both.

“Do you want me to read it now?” he murmured.

“Yes.”

Maybe it was cruel and malicious, and maybe I am cruel and malicious, but I just wanted to know that he read it. All of it.

Thus, we relocated to the back porch and once again I sank as close to the earth as possible and he rose to a seated position, near the sky. Then, he cracked my present’s spine and I winced with anticipation and worry and hope. And I watched his face.

There was silence for a very long time, so I played with his eyes while he read. At first they were nothing but the green, jetlagged eyes of a teenaged boy – heavily guarded and wary of parley. Thus I pried gently at them, like a deer licking the salt from slab of bark or an artist stripping an ancient creation of dust. With each movement, I peeled away a little more and a little more, until they had snowballed into an emerald window of emotion. And I watched his soul.

At times I caught a flicker of a smile, a fleshy rose of disbelieving ecstasy. In these moments I was proud, if only for a sliver of a clock face, because my words had MADE HIM SMILE. Even though he was an evil, treacherous demon of the heart, the silence was almost too comfortable to comprehend and I fought hard not to smile back.

Other times I saw sorrow dripping from every corner of his countenance. I observed hurt and anguish and stress and all other emotions sharp and scarring melt through the lines of your eyes and form in a messy green puddle by our feet. I wanted to kiss and pummel him all at once. I longed to cry out, “You? You! You have no right to experience sadness!” Get some perspective or don’t paint the picture.

But then there was this moment where I could have sworn he was about to cry. Then I felt remorse. Then I was sorry.

Most of all, he felt it too. “I’m so sorry,” he had whispered almost too softly for me to catch, finally breaking the silent coma.

At one point he had to stop and I was afraid he would melt away before he had a chance to begin reading again. There was quiet once more, and we didn’t need to speak because God gave us eyes.

But the evening was not all noiseless sorrow and mourning. We were laughing, too. Discussing. Swapping stories and adventures. We spoke without speeches and we shared and we teased, all in the midst of torture.

I don’t know what I expected to happen when he finished my book, but no change at all was not on the list. When he shook his head and apologized once more and said without saying that all was still as it was hours before, I felt the sting travel from my throat to the backs of my eyes. I lied back on the wood of the porch to keep the tears down (oh, gravity) and without thinking, propped up my feet on his knees. We chatted while I fought the urge to sob.

(I felt sinful, because I nearly enjoyed it.)

So we talked as the sky melted from blue to gold to pink to fiery orange to gray rain. We talked and we basked in our own echoes. Even in utter sadness I think we both felt the same – ragged, but married to the poetry of the moment.

While I tried to breathe tranquility back into my heart, he told me quirks about myself that I hardly knew. I told him of all the places I had been that reminded me of him.

At one point we were looking at each other in cradled solitude and I thought he might kiss me. He didn’t.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you too much,” he told me instead.

He did, but I can’t remember what I said back.

“I missed you when you were gone,” I muttered later. “Missed you everyday. There’s a bunch of oil pastel drawings at home to prove it.”

We could have existed together on that back porch for decades. We might as well have. But eventually it all just came back to, “I can’t be with you and you can’t change my mind,” and I wanted to cry but waited until he was gone first.

Right before he fell of the map of us, I asked for one last kiss. It was long and firm and natural. Our kisses have never been awkward, anything but. He always told me my kisses are like faerie kisses – once he tried to imitate it, but failed. It made me blush every time.

Then the wind began tugging at his shirt and he started to blow away. As my eyes grew wet and cheeks even redder than he had just made them, I caught a piece of his forlorn murmur:

“Kissed by a faerie…”