I’ve never been in love. Not really.
Maybe I’m too young. Maybe I have a hard time getting close to people so I feel like I can’t really fall in love with them. That’s what love is, right? Knowing someone so wholly that they’re as familiar as your own body? I’ve never known somebody like that. But I’ve gotten close.
There was this guy, a friend of a friend that stuck to my side like a parasite. I learned to get along with him. We’d laugh sometimes, but he had his circle and I had mine, and they hardly intersected.
I met him in February, but I only grew to know him in July. My friends wanted to spend a night of our last summer together at some nearby camping site. It wasn’t real camping, and I had to beg my parents for a week to let me go, but it was fun. We roasted marshmallows on a bonfire like the movies.
When we were supposed to go to sleep, I was restless. I went for some fresh air and found him there. He was silent. Staring right up at the sky. I sat next to him. We talked for a while, hushed whispers about nothing at all.
“Sometimes”, he confessed eventually, “I like watching the sun leave its mark on the side of cars as they drive by. There’s something about the way the metal shines. When I see a hoard of them, I imagine the bright flares are stars, and I imagine there’s nothing more. I imagine the car I drive is a star, too. And for a moment, I think I feel at home”.
I laid next to him as we stared into the starless abyss of night above us.
I’ve never felt that way again. Grass tickling the crook of my neck, sweat falling from my temple to my mouth, the saline taste lingering. I should’ve felt human. But I couldn’t help feeling that I was a star, too. The thought rushed in my head, and I felt it rise up my throat. I was a star, and so was he, and so was the girl I passed in the hallways with the fried red hair, and so was every insufferable man I’d ever met–and maybe if we could all feel like stars again, we would find we shared, if nothing else, a feeling. Maybe that feeling could be home.
I raised my arms over my head. I heard him laugh to himself. I couldn’t help but think he looked holy, then. In his own right. The moonlight hit his face as he turned to me, and I didn’t see a star. I traced the path the light left on him, crawling from his curled hair to his upturned lips. He looked like how I imagined a dimple on God’s cheek would look.
I think I understood him, then. If only for a moment.