The first time you kissed me, I thought it was an accident. You were crying again and like all the other times you sobbed into my shoulder, you refused to tell me what made you so distressed.
I held you and rubbed your back because I didn’t know what else to do. You were heartbreakingly beautiful. Your lashes were slick with tears; your nose and cheeks were pink with the effort of weeping. Even in your despair, I was hopelessly attracted to you.
My heart was in my throat as guilt and fear swirled around in my chest. There was a time and place for my feelings and I couldn’t think of a less appropriate time for them aside from a funeral.
So you can imagine my surprise when your lips crashed into mine. It was a hard kiss, all teeth and resistance because you caught me off guard. You couldn’t have meant it because of the way it hurt both of us, but we stayed like that for a while as your kiss slowly softened.
I allowed you to devour me in my bed beneath the warm glow of the old lamp on my bedside table. I was consumed by the taste of your strawberry lip gloss and the smell of your vanilla perfume. Overwhelmed, I closed my eyes and thought only of you.
Of course, that was when you decided to pull away. You looked at me as if you were seeing me for the first time, a long stare that would have been uncomfortable from anyone else. But the blue of your eyes and the gold of your hair were more familiar to me than the lines on my palms. You were etched into my very being and it seemed that you realized something that I had known ever since I met you.
We belonged together. It didn’t matter how, whether as friends or lovers. At that moment, there was no other place in the universe more meant for you than my bed.
And it felt so wrong. I saw the panic in your eyes as you remembered that you had a boyfriend even though you just kissed your best friend.
It was a fluke. At least that was what your face told me. Sometimes friends accidentally kiss. I chalked it up to you experimenting with your body and closed my lamp, letting you snuggle in my arms as neither of us dared to breathe a word about what just happened.
I accepted the fact that you couldn’t care for me the same way I cared for you. I told myself that my mind was playing tricks on me. The way you held my hand and lingered in my touch were figments of my imagination. And the way you kissed me, especially the way your lips moved against mine …
Suffice to say, I had trouble sleeping that night. You slept better than you had in ages, but I was plagued with new demons.
Because now I knew I definitely liked girls. There was no question about my feelings. Before, I could pretend that I was eventually going to start liking boys and that my eyes would stop wandering to the wrong gender. But our kiss had dashed all hopes of that happening.
I loved you and I was certain that these weren’t the kinds of feelings that friends had for each other.
But there was no way you were going to return those feelings. During the day, you ignored me and spent every second with your boyfriend. I should have given you the cold shoulder in return, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to do something as simple as that.
As I sat with Evan and fiddled with the bracelet he gave me, I stared at you shamelessly. I looked at your skimpy top and the shorts that barely covered your ass, an outfit that would have easily given your mother a heart attack. I thought about your body, pondering over it thoroughly and ruminating about your curves.
I was going insane. If I couldn’t have you, then my mind schemed to find some other way to covet a part of you. And my brain, being the brilliant thing that it was, chose your body.
“Maybe she’ll be your friend again someday,” Evan said. He awkwardly patted my shoulder, a gesture meant to console me but it only agitated me further.
I didn’t think being your friend was going to be enough anymore. While being your girlfriend was out of the question, I’d settle for a place in your soul right next to where you kept the goldfish. That was if you wanted me in your life anymore.
God, I was pathetic. I said so to Evan, who insisted that I wasn’t.
“She’s the only person who ever really cared about you before you met me. Anyone in your shoes would feel devastated,” he remarked astutely.
The truth stabbed me in the gut. He was right and I hated it.
“I would have had more friends if you were nicer to me,” I shot back.
For a second, he looked hurt. But that misty sheen in his eyes disappeared, replaced by an emotion I couldn’t decipher.
“You’re never going to forgive me for what I did to you, right?”
A long silence passed between us. It struck me how he was so unlike you, dark where you were light and cruel when you had been kind. But because of that, he was more like me than I wanted to admit.
Later, when you revealed your feelings to me, you would tell me that I reminded you of stars.
“You don’t seem like much from afar, but when the right person looks at you, they know how to appreciate you. Most people don’t think much about a single star, not unless it’s a part of a constellation. And you, Nana, contain infinite galaxies. Not everyone is going to get that.”
But you were the sun so everyone understood you. Stars only shone brightly in the dark. In that sense, perhaps it was fated that I would be friends with Evan.
“I can try to forgive you,” I replied. “But what did I ever do to deserve anything that you did to me before?”
For some reason, I couldn’t call it what it was: bullying. Saying it would make it too real. I would be forced to acknowledge that I was friends with someone who made me a victim.
“Nothing,” he said. “You never did anything to deserve this.”
And yet here we were. I should have been angry. There was no rhyme or reason behind what he did to me. He hurt me because he could, not out of personal malice.
It was punishment enough that he had to atone for years of schoolyard tyranny. The fact that he had no choice in his feelings for me took the bite out of any leftover resentment I might have had for him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was selfish to expect that you would forgive me so soon.”
Wasn’t it enough that I allowed him to be my friend? And yet he wanted the world of me. I would have slapped him if I hadn’t felt the same about you. In my torment, I was becoming more like Evan.
I groaned in frustration. My self-hatred had no bounds.
“I will forgive you if you wait for me,” I said. My heart couldn’t change colors in a day, much less a week.
“The same way you wait for her?”
I turned away from him, afraid that my eyes would betray my hurt. Was that what I was doing? Do stars wait for the sun to shine on them?
“I never wronged Elle,” I pointed out. “She just … lost interest.”
A partial truth. I still saw you at night, but when dawn came, we were strangers. That day, I didn’t know if I would see you again. I was terrified that we had gone too far.
“What if she came back?”
My back straightened. Then, everything in the world would be right again. Life would be infinitely sweeter, the air would be easier to breathe, things would be as they were before, and–
“I get it,” Evan said, halting the torrent of words spilling from my mouth. “You would welcome her with open arms.”
I frowned at his exasperated tone. “She’s everything to me.”
“You’ll get over her.”
No, I won’t. If that had been the last day I saw you, I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself.
“You will,” he insisted. “Trust me. One day, you’ll forget her and forgive me. Time is funny like that.”
For his sake, I tried to imagine a reality without you. I contemplated drinking a cup of cyanide instead and found that hypothetical to be a pleasant alternative.
I was nothing, with or without you. It wasn’t a matter of choice. I simply had the utter misfortune of being born this way.
I didn’t want to be worthless and lonely. But I couldn’t help how I felt, fighting to hold back tears for the rest of the day. I thought of one million ways to apologize for our kiss. When that proved unproductive, I thought of one million more to remove myself from your life permanently.
It took hours before I resolved that I would make do with the circumstances. I couldn’t force you to love me anymore than Evan could force me to feel the same for him.
But just when I was growing comfortable with the idea, you showed up in my bed. I knew then that no matter what I did, I could never forget you.
13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYgBeCswhqC
