Ephemeral and Ethereal, but No Less Real to Me

I wrote this about a romance I had in New Orleans once. Decided it might make a decent novel one day, and I suppose this would be part of it.

I grabbed his wrist, and he turned around, and I grabbed his collar, and he pushed me into the wall behind the movie theatre with both of his arms pressed against it, on either side of my shoulders, and kissed me. The back of my skull hit the wall and made a thud, but I couldn’t feel it because by the time my brain lit up the part that tells me I’m in pain, a thousand other parts of it lit up telling me something else, drowning that tiny piece out.

 

He pulled me by the arm outside, down staircases and through streets and past traffic and the people yelling obscenities at us and the families that kept their eyes downcast and all the young people that gave a smile like they knew a secret that I didn’t. He dragged me all the way to the street I lived on as if I couldn’t find it myself, and truth is maybe I couldn’t. The whole time I felt that my body was moving but my mind had stayed there, pressed against the wall, leaving an imprint on it and the rest of me was a mindless shell. But then he pressed me against a stop sign, placing his hand on the back of my neck, and I felt like my mind was in my body again. I was present once more, and his lips drifted down past mine, grazing them. Then he kissed me lightly on my chin and cheeks and eyelids and forehead and all the places in between until he finally kissed me deeply on the lips. One, two, three seconds.

 

Did I kiss back? I think I kissed back.

 

Three seconds and I felt like I was replanted there on the street by a stop sign and a broken streetlight and the dark suburban houses with all the lights turned off. Houses that were full of people that could have seen me or maybe couldn’t. And it certainly didn’t matter because that moment wasn’t theirs at all. He left right after, and told me something, but I didn’t hear what it was because he smiled as he said it and I was sure the words weren’t nearly as important as that smile. I kissed back, that smile said, and I was a good kisser, It said. And as I walked home, I realized I hadn’t moved at all. I was still in the back of the theater, dizzy and full of something ethereal. Still under a broken street light with eyes that could have seen me, but it didn’t matter if they did, and they didn’t because they were closed dreaming things vivid and colorful, but no more vivid or colorful than that kiss by the sign under the broken lamp.

 

I walked to my room, and pulled out a book, but my eyes weren’t connected to me. I was just a body, and I was too many other places to make out something as small as letters. There was me here, and there was another me exiting a theater, and a million me’s walking home and standing at corners, and a me pressed against a stop sign, and another me walking down a street to a home I’d never seen with a smile that I’d never had before.  I was split across the night like the strings of a spider web, and I was trying to make out something that I had caught in the net. My eyes couldn’t read it, my hands couldn’t feel it, and so it was only with my mouth that I could say it so that the rest of my body could know it. I realized what he had said after that kiss and replied in turn, hoping all of the collective me’s could say it loud enough for him to hear it wherever he was now.

“I like you too, Milo.”