The room was congested with lust. I'll admit that most of it was mine. I couldn't keep my hands off of her, even when I knew she was sick of it. She was beautiful and she invited me over earlier that night. I was with my friends, but I couldn't turn down that invitation. After the night was over, I got dropped off with nothing but the scarlet dress and black and cream heels I was wearing from church, earlier that Sunday, which gave me an impeccable disposition despite the time of my arrival and current state of mind. When I got there, her mother was waiting to meet me, in the darkness of the living room, with only the TV as light. That helped me out, too, in the way that her mother wasn't able to make the parallels between the color of my dress and the irregular tint of the whites of my eyes.
Four hours have gone by since I told her I would get to her house, and she stayed up with me for another two when I finally got there. She was exhausted. She'd turn over, retreating into the warm covers and 3 am peace. Then I would pull my hands back, in desperate innocence, and realize how homesick I am.
At that moment, I also realized it was 3 in the morning. I abandoned her gorgeous, brown curly head and laid on the floor with my back against her carpet. Across the room, on the bed, lay a comatose beauty stirring quietly in real world time.
I wish she was up.
On all shooting stars and 11:11's, I wish my body knew when it was time for sleep. As far as it knew, 3 am wasn't a place for sleep, but dangerous water, where thoughts rose too high and went crashing down, pulling me under like a tsunami.
I'm still so high, I thought to myself.
My only company was the white illuminated dot inside a framed purple sky. By orthodox, the moon gave life to these fluctuating waves that swept me away every night for the past year as I laid in my bed thinking of the girl miles away. These thoughts would get pushed and pulled every direction, erasing the traces in the sand from my previous thought.
I would think one-thousand miles an hour and make connections until something brings me back to her. It never took long. I can't remember a moment where I didn't miss her, even when we were together. She lived in Pataskala, Ohio; roughly 500 miles from my town in New Jersey. When the gravity of those circumstances would be too heavy, what the moon would do for us is just come back every night, and we'd look at it and comfort ourselves in the concept that we're looking at the same moon and the distance isn't so bad.
She would definitely be awake if we were together.
Time seemed to revolve around us, within my two-day visits in cramped hotels somewhere in Ohio. And though our environment was imperfect, we were completely perfect and perfectly complete.
Every second together was spent skin on skin, hand in hand, and lips locked in love. We were crazy about each other, but we also knew I would have to return to New Jersey soon. An 8-hour drive through highways and rest stops among other traveling people. Truckers, families, and a diverse variety of people everywhere, but the first few moments after leaving her was the worst.
The withdrawal was the bereft of life and the loneliest thing I know. The time we were given wasn't nearly enough to satisfy our crave for each other. I know that even if we were given infinity, it couldn't suffice. I wanted to be with her all the time. I breathed her like she was my air and in turn, I was alive.
Long distance relationships are a fine red wine, it's an acquired taste and not for the tender young minded. Dark, intense maroons and burgundies aging in the time apart, that eventually liberated the richness of our love when it was finally served to us. We survived on the inebriated atmosphere for a few weeks after our separation, but the hangover tortured us both. We didn't have the money to travel as often as we wanted, and the yearn to be drunk in love again grew into rigid frustration. Under pressure, our bottle shattered and all that was left was the dark puddle of mulberry surrounding broken glass. In our attempts at gathering the pieces, we cut our fingers against the shards, and cringed at each other's fingertips, wet with an indistinguishable mixture of blood, wine and tears, and we abandoned it to attend to our own wounds.
