i.
Your lips remained perfectly still when the sun stretched itself out along the horizon, as if it was capable of swallowing the world in one gulp. You told me that perhaps it was, and that one day it might decide to devour us without a hint of warning. I hated to hear you talk like that. At thirteen years old, I was gullible wide green eyes and awkwardly parted lips through soft, moonlight kisses. I heard the end of the world in your words and decided to be afraid of the sun’s giant teeth rather than the bitterness lingering in your heart.
ii.
You had seen more of the fields and backwoods than I imagined I ever would, and I believed everything you said. Two years felt like an perpetuity of space and time and oxygen between us, and it took you years to walk through the battlefield to where I was standing still.
Your lips only moved in the dark and your words only escaped in thin, misty veils when nobody was looking. The moon was witness enough to the way your hand snaked around my waist and I thought dimly that I couldn’t see the colour of your eyes or the calluses on the ends of your fingers.
Two years still felt like a long time but somehow the space between my lips perfectly accommodated yours. And I smiled and you smiled but the rough surface behind my back was scratching me and you took that as a cue to stop.
The moon did not see your lips touch mine for the rest of the night.
iii.
I was still young at fifteen as you were still old at seventeen and I had yet to trust a boy’s feelings until his fingers fit between mine and his eyes never strayed away. I asked you to hold my hand but I think maybe the spaces between my fingers were too small and that’s why you kissed me on the forehead instead. You told me my eyes were beautiful and I told you that was a bullshit compliment and you still thought you could scold me for swearing.
iv.
I cried when you didn’t ask me to formal and I cried when I caught you with her beneath the sun, when your lips refused to part for me. And I wished and I prayed that the monster in the sky would only swallow you up and leave the rest of us alone because maybe it only wanted the evil things, and you were the evilest of them all.
You still walked me home that night because you always walked me home along the dusty path and littered weeds beneath our feet. The wildflowers were in bloom and you picked my favourite colour only for me to toss it away when it met my fingertips. The earth was cold and quiet and the crickets were too afraid to creak because evil was following me home and purposefully stepping on my heels to get my attention.
I pushed my body a few feet ahead of you, but your legs were much longer and you had no trouble keeping up. You wasted words trying to convince me that your insides weren’t black and that you might be a million different colours but I knew you were no comparison to a rainbow after a summer storm.
My voice spoke hatred and my eyes spoke misery and my hand spoke anger as I slammed the porch door in your face. Go away, I don’t want you anymore.
v.
The space between your ribs was grey and it reflected against the sky and the water and my green eyes. She was prettier and the spaces between her fingers were bigger than mine would ever be. Her eyes were too blue to be swallowed by your grey and her smile willed the sun to shine when you scared it off.
My heartbeat was unsteady for weeks and I begged the sun to eat me whole before you got to me first.
You can’t walk home alone. I told you I wasn’t a child anymore and that my bones were strong enough to withstand a couple of falls. My skin wouldn’t tear from tripping on the grass and my lungs wouldn’t fill up with water if I landed in the river.
You’re not allowed to walk home alone. And when exactly had I allowed you to tell me what to do?
Once again you stepped on my heels and this time the flower was tucked behind my left ear where my fingers wouldn’t flick it away. You told me you’d shower me in flower petals that the colour of my eyes would be the stem of and that I’d be every colour of the rainbow.
You held my hand and I let my fingers fall limp in your warmth.
vi.
When I am eighteen you will be twenty and I will still listen to your tales about the sun devouring me as my eyes are wide. You still will not trust the grass not to tear my skin or the water not to fill my lungs and you’ll fool me with flowers and reasoning over rainbows. Your lips will only part beneath the moonlight and the spaces between my fingers will continue to shrink after the sun consumes the sky and you search for warmer hands.
I am delicate. And you are infatuated with delicate things that you challenge yourself not to break.
My knees will never bleed and I will never cough up water on the side of the ocean. I will only be kissed by lips I cannot see and the only pain I will feel are the sharp teeth of the sun biting against my heart.
