Before Sunset

I stole your t-shirt and you stole my heart, that April night. I was mildly drunk the whole time. You introduced me to your friends and to your building and then finally to your bed. It was magnificent although it was a bunk bed. We had had sex on a lot of places before. Your car. My car. Your bed. My parents’ bed. My aunt’s bed. Your father’s car… But none quite hit the feeling that it was when I entered your 20m² apartment and climbed on that horrible ladder to your bed. Your room barely fitted one, imagine 2 bodies ready to interlace on one another.

We did it anyway.

The next morning you intertwined with me and I kissed you slowly like we had all the time in the world. Because in that time frame we actually did. It was a Friday, but you weren’t working and I was on a short vacation trip so we took our time with each other. I showered in your bathroom and used your roommate’s shampoo by mistake and never really confessed that to you. When it was your turn to shower I took my time looking at your shelf, your books one by one, like somehow it was a window to your soul I was just then gaining access to, even after a whole year of knowing you and your body like a map I had to memorize.

I knew what made you shiver but not the fundamentals of your beliefs, I knew how you liked to be touched but not how much water you drank at night, I knew your ways but not your habits. It was like entering a new place for the first time, a place you passed in front but never really gathered up the courage to enter, and suddenly on a friday morning you decided you had enough and you entered it with fierce determination. You halt barely three steps in. The wonder of it makes you shiver.

We continued after your shower, went for breakfast in the supermarket at the corner of your street, I had cheese bread, you had a chocolate cappuccino and some other thing my mind traits me to remember. We decided to walk to the mall, a fresh kind of morning, my wet hair dripping droplets of water on the pavement floor just to disappear mere seconds after it. Kinda like you and I.

We walked for miles and went shopping and I accompanied you, our hands never quite touching tho. Like we barely knew each other, like we didn’t spend the whole night in each other’s arms. It’s a funny, but good feeling because I thought it would hurt, but it didn’t. You and I fit like this. We know we’re more than friends — there’s no way that’s all we are, having to look at our past — but at the same time it’s comforting. It’s never weird. It’s not like you’re an ex, it’s not like we hated each other. We liked each other or at least I liked you.

When finally back at your apartment I kiss your cheek and leave, I’m light. It’s not painful, I don’t feel used or like it was something ugly and ordinary. It was something. Something I can’t quite put my finger around it just yet. But it’s there, anyways. It will survive, somehow, through the years e through the distance.