There was a tap on my head so I looked up at your knees.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"How's it going?"

"Fine."

"I haven't seen you in so long…"

"Busy."

Because that's how I roll when you are.

I don't take the same bus you do anymore, since we moved down to the Airport road. To get to the stop, I have to walk through one of two sets of traffic lights turning green. It's like chess; either one of two roads across, left or right, then diagonal as always. Sideways is how I always seem to approach the simple. The complex is what I dive straight into.

Being made of water, born under a sign disposed to it, you get used to your eyes turning blue once those waves start rocking. We're feelers with minds where our hearts are supposed to be so our canvasses never turn out quite the way we plan. To see distortion in beauty, Picasso stabbing a red-tipped brush to his lovers lips in Dora Maar au Chat. To worship her ashes, Sylvia Plath exhaling ink like air. We obscure the obvious for the dark to remain incomplete in the shadows.

A crab scuttling across the sand, the softness of your footsteps tickling my inner smile makes me forget about your shell sometimes. You always said that you were too soft to be hard enough. Just a boy slipping about in his father's shoes. But you've got to be tough; macho enough to disappear completely into the rest of the herd. Another brick in the wall and I'm the only cuss you long to stick in your mouth like the cigarette your buddy sucks on in the comfort of your sparse apartment.

The sky is made of stained, charcoal-smudged white cement and the ground slaps of ice beneath my heels. The clouds are graying but the storm still rages outside the window, whipping waves, curling them into mountains of foam and ceil. In here, with you, without my head aloft on your shoulder, the quiet trembles and the picture appears to shimmer in the drear – droning… dire? – cold.

I can't quite cry yet. But there is time and enough people in the room to try it. I could do it and they would bury me under sheaves of loose talk, cheap shisha smoke and a burnt bowl of crude gossip ripe for the picking. I can taste the air from the breath you waste reveling in some deed that's too childlike to have me splitting my sides like the rest of them. What was it today? Jumping the gun on your father's quota of comebacks and earning the bruise on your cheek for all that trouble? But dear, don't you know, I have something worse on the line if I were to keep this play up.

Outside – even your laughter falls to static once I stare through the grime – Karama feels as forbidding as Agrabah. Four o'clock on a muddy afternoon, the shops are packed up for tea. Its streets remain stagnant from the early bustle of trucks unloading their wares, salesman spitting mouthfuls of blood-red betel juice onto the pavements before plying off their Valentino knock-offs at discount prices and police car sirens weaving a map made up of the city's black spots, the infected pustules filled with murky pus that bleed Dubai dry.

"And then I said 'What's love gotta do with it?' and like, then, right then, she…"

"Woah, duuude… totally had it coming…"

"Bitch, don't tell me you didn't feel that!"

"Yeah, what've you got against us women, huh?"

"Just sayin', is all…"

"So what's your name?"

Outside, Karama feels as enticing as Agrabah. Out there, amidst an unfamiliar sea of strangers, I could be alone. At ease.

No one would know my name. No one would smirk that mouth the way his ol' buddy does now and no one else would giggle at the little waif Romeo found loitering at his door. The one squinting through the sun-dappled illusions in her eyes from behind the stack of textbooks and novels she carries because they won't all fit in her backpack.

"Really? How old are you, darling?"

"Cut it out. She's a third year."

The possessiveness in your voice flares as the end of the cigarette nestled between your fingers dims. And I admit, you look your best when you smolder.

But is that it?

There it lands between your lips instead, this time. The smoke plumes grow into clouds, whiter than the ceiling, reeking of fake apple orchards in bloom.

I wait around long enough for another leer about my youth to come along, then rise from the chair on your right, pick my dog-eared copy of Adam Bede and walk right out to the first drenched street I've seen in years. A passing car rolls along and splashes my feet in a flurry of rain-water.

I couldn't speak then so the words would have stay here within me from now on. I swallow them and feel them harden to hail in the pit of my chest so unlike the rain I'd loved until today.

You tapped my shoulder so I kept myself to the book in my hands. 'Then from that eye, hitherto so dry and burning, was seen to roll a big tear, which fell slowly down that deformed visage so long contracted by despair. Perhaps it was the first that the unfortunate creature had ever shed', page three hundred and twenty-two.

"Hey."

Whatever will be will be. Like a bird flies south for warmth, I will find my own anchor to keep me breathing above the water. Like the little mermaid asleep in the collection beside me, I will keep on returning to the deepest oceans to look for treasure forgotten beyond my reach. But wherever that may be, that time is not today to the hour to the minute that you take to remind me why.

"Hey… please listen. Listen, please…"

Juliet's gone, sweetheart. Maybe you'll hear the door closing soon.

A/N: The quote in italics is from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.