Once upon a time, there was a girl and a boy.

The boy wasn't the arrogant jock with the angel-blue eyes and witty insults, and he didn't have the rough exterior that covered a sensitive soul. Football player, yes, but he never did play the role of knight in shining armor.

But then again, the girl would never have been a damsel in distress. She wasn't lovely and broken and beautiful, and she didn't believe in shooting stars or wish for her own fairytale or listen to love songs. She was never the sweet bookworm with the heart of gold, or the ice queen with the snappy comebacks, or the average one with the straight brown hair. A cynic, yes, but she didn't have a dark, secret past. And she would have told the boy she didn't need saving.

The girl liked stories, but not fairytales, because fairytales always left her with a taste like broken green glass and crushed pearls and bitter diamond dust. Like dull copper pennies on her tongue and those melted, plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. Like spilled ink and dusty, raw grains of sand-- already broken. She says she likes her coffee black (but she swallowed those brittle, saccharine clichés--sipped them slowly with milk and sugar.)

The boy's laughing at something with his friends. Happens to look her in the eye when she passes. (And she freezes for a second.) She bites her lip and walks on without glancing behind (because she's scared that maybe he had seen her eccentricity glowing neon through her bones- that maybe he'd glimpsed the geography of her veins, drenched in vermillion and lithium-sweet gasoline- that maybe, maybe he'd seen her heart jolt.)

The girl hates when he's cocky and fronts. But sometimes he talks to her, when no one else is watching. She'd say something ridiculous because she couldn't think straight and her cheeks would burn and she'd feel herself blushing when he smiled back. And no, she just couldn't stop her lips from curving upward when he'd laugh his little-boy laugh.

The boy's eyes are amber caramel and dark chocolate and tender and warm. Eyes like August rain. Not nearly solid, so she falls falls falls into them. She thinks his eyes are beautiful, but she hides behind the hard black disks of her own eyes and doesn't tell him so (because she doesn't want to shatter, doesn't want to drown.) His eyes freeze, frees, free her.

So there was a boy, and there was a girl. And in the end, they were the cliché of clichés.

I finished typing the last word and it hit me. I wanted... a story. I would never admit it to anyone else, but raging teenage hormones or the changing magnetic field of the earth or solar radiation or something had changed my outlook. (Or maybe it was him.)

But it wasn't real. I didn't know him the way I knew my guy friends because I barely ever talked to him. But I didn't think of him the same way either.

I realized I needed... I needed to tell someone. Anyone. So I decided to post the story online and hoped maybe someone would understand how I felt. Maybe I could figure things out along the way. And maybe I could get my happy ending too. Maybe.

Author's note:

First of all, thank you for reading this far. I would really appreciate it if you could either offer constructive criticism or answer a question that will be addressed in the next chapter. (Please skip below if you don't want to read my rambling.) The idea is so that maybe this story could be more relatable to you as a reader, or... (and I would love you so much if you do this) you guys could respond to each other and share poetry as long as it's relevant and not just advertisement.

Do you believe in love at first sight?

It's just a one word answer (or if you're super amazing, an answer, explanation, a piece of your work, a and suggestion. It's good karma).

Please? Thank you so much for reading and/or reviewing!

- curious contradiction