Cold Kiss

I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn't check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now.

Love doesn’t break easily, I found. But people do.

It wasn't love right away, because nothing ever is no matter what the songs say, but it was the start of it. A beginning in one way, and the end in another. I think that might always be true of love.

But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn’t be trusted to hold when you’re the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control.

What I wanted was to blow a hole in the sky, explode a star, let the burning embers scorch me and everything they touched.

He waits. "And I think that is what I would like love to be. Leaving room for each other, knowing that not every step is going to be side by side. Giving more than taking. Waiting. Trusting,

Whoever decided that love should hurt sucks. It's been silent for too long, and I watch as Mom wipes a tear off her cheek. Whoever decided that life should hurt sucks even more.

It didn’t matter. I loved him. I loved him so much that I couldn’t see anything else for a while. Danny filled the cracks inside me, blotted out the cold, empty places in the world. It didn’t take long before Danny was the only thing that mattered. Love like that is what they make movies about. It’s the thing you’re supposed to want, the answer to every question, the song that you’re supposed to sing. But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn’t be trusted to hold when you’re the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control. Love doesn’t break easily, I found. But people do.

I waned him back. I wanted him back so much I couldn't think about anything else. Everywhere I looked was suddenly somewhere Danny wasn't. My hands were empty because Danny wasn't holding them. My room echoed with quiet because Danny wasn't there whispering ridiculous things to make me laugh, or make me shiver. It seemed so right. Danny was mine, I was his, and that wasn't going to work if he was dead. So I would make him not dead, anymore.

The fact that I'm sitting here in the chilly leaves imagining ways to get rid of the boy I loved so much I brought him back from the dead is so ridiculous, so horrifying, it's almost funny. In an unbelievable, black humor way that's not really funny at all.

After a while, it got too hard not to let him take my hand in the hallway, or snug up behind me at my locker, his chin balanced on the top of head as his hands snaked around my waist. After a while I wanted to share it, to show it off, to let the world see why I was smiling like a complete idiot half the time.

We don't talk after that, not really. And it's not perfect, I mean, there aren't, like, rainbows and fireworks and sirens going off, but it's perfect anyway. Because it's Danny almost toppling over when he wrestles out of his jeans, and it's Danny laughing into the skin of my belly when I hit my head on the wall hard enough that we both hear it crack. And it's Danny who tangles our fingers together when we're almost there, holding on tight, watching my face, and it's Danny who lets me touch and explore and whisper and press smiling kisses into his hair and his cheek later, after.

By the time we were in high school the only difference was that we were talking about how J.D. didn't know that tongue in a girl's ear wasn't a good thing instead of which one of us was going to marry the lead singer of Fall Out Boy one day.