Name of my Love | on hold

nineteen

Free falling

I fight back the urge to keep my eyes close as if the desire to live has outgrown death itself. I remind myself, it's going to be a special day. I open my eyes leisurely and drink in the blur view of the morning sky via the window, which looks quite different today. A soft glow of light seeps through the netted-curtains and falls on the study desk nearby the window.

As I squint my eyes facing the closest thing next to me - which is breathing peacefully - realization dawns on me and I quickly turn pale. A pang of horror engulfs the entirety of my existence.

Holy shit. It wasn't a dream.

I swivel my eyes at him with a known wane look. He is still sleeping. The weight I feel on my legs causes an hiccup to arise. But with so much of terrifying thoughts wilding my mind, the hiccups do not bother to come back.

We are lying face-to-face, hardly few centimeters apart, our legs tangled together with the comforter - like roots interwoven on itself and heaps of soil - as though we have grown new ways to interlock each other overnight. One sinking into deep slumber while the other paralysed, in a condition near to and worse than heart attack. How on this earth I ended up here? I rub my eyes carefully to confirm my precarious eyesight. Then blink my eyes rapidly, still bewildered, partly trying to mitigate the current situation.

He isn't disappearing. God.

My face starts to get coloured in different shades with embarrassment overflowing on the pot of decency. We slept together. Everything happened so fast that I doubt if I was sober at all.

Just for the sake of clearing the last speck of dubiety, I crawl my hand to the side of my thigh and pinch it hard. I wince involuntarily at the registration of pain, and without my acknowledgement - a hardly catchable sign of relief washes my face, maybe, I wished it to be more real than a vivid dream. And it is. I force a sharp intake of breath in order to calm down my kicking pulse, going berserk beneath my skin.

I count in my mind.

One. Two. Three.

As my mind languidly reaches number ten, my eyes start to sweep across his soft features. The distance between us is hardly a distance now, it's close enough that I can even count his eyelashes. Soft snores effuse out of his slightly parted off-pink lips, and his hair is unruly, some strands of hair following the rules of gravity while rest touching the top of his dark eyebrows.

In the beacon of morning sunlight and with that irresistible proximity, I start to see his beauties and flaws, bordering him and making him a human. A very thin, pale scar of very small length runs parallel and lower to his left cheek bone that I barely noticed before. It's still not a flaw, but a hallmark of uniqueness. Scars aren't supposed to be flaws.

I flex my fingers and place them numbly at the space between our chests, killing the urge to trace his jawline with my fingertips. His face is truly an art and someone who worships art can never resist it.

He presses his lips twice before his eyelids start to budge a little, eyeballs rolling inside in an attempt to expose them to the morning atmosphere. I gulp as I watch him open his eyes slowly. The first thing that comes into his view is my wide-eyed, quizzical face beaming at him but his face remains impassive, his eyes staring at mine with rather blankness and slight wonder.

His gaze slowly starts to desperately sweep my features like I would disappear in the blink of an eye ––like it's a part of his vivid imagination. Before I could even decide to whether or not break this groundbreaking reality to him, his earlier pacific eyes turn huge in realization.