The Wave

I remember the shock of electric energy I felt the first time my skin touched his. It’s almost like its addicting pain is is still reverberating through my body to this day. That night he was nothing but himself, the douche bag frat star who is too misunderstood for any mere mortal to understand. He’s closed off, always talking, but never speaking. I watched him drink cup after cup of beer, with each sip becoming more and more lost inside his own mind. We were beer pong partners, and we couldn’t make a single shot, but we kept shooting anyway.

The music was blaring and people were conversing the way they always do when they’re drunk. A hello is shared from one stranger to another just because they’re both standing alone. Two girls shriek loudly over the clamoring chaos and embrace as if they haven’t seen each other in years. Boys parade around with their hands on random chicks asses and clink cans with anyone they recognize. These people who in the daylight do nothing but judge each other suddenly become human in the night. They develop souls. They act the way we’re supposed to.

We were three games in, neither of us had sunk one single fucking ball. I’m not coordinated in the slightest, but my complete and utter distraction caused by the music and the conversing and the shrieking and the blossoming souls of these people I hate and his face didn’t help. Oh his face. His beautiful, overlooked and overpowered face. But I threw anyways even though I was so lost in the world around me.

And I sunk it. I made the shot. And I looked at him with immense awe. And I leapt into his arms because I was proud of my tiny accomplishment. He recognized that I conquered something that had been dangling over my head for the entire evening. It didn’t matter that we barely knew each other or that I had succeeded in a task hundreds of college students achieve a day. It mattered that I did it, and he was there with me.

So I kissed him. And suddenly the music and the conversing and the shrieking and the blossoming souls all became dull and faded far away from where I was. His skin against mine and the taste of his silky lips sent lightning bolts through my entire being. To him I am sure it was just a kiss then. I was some girl his friend introduced him to who was also drunk and so we were kissing. But to me it was so much more. The instant our skin met I was submerged in his being.

He is a wave. He is deceivingly massive in strength and power. He is fluid, always growing larger and gaining force. He is unpredictable, you can never tell when he will break and crash in sputtering droplets into the rest of the sea.

I am a pebble. I am small and easily lost. I am firm and unchangeable, yet the harsh world wears me smaller and smaller until there is barely anything left of me. I drift on the ocean floor and trust that this wave will carry me to the place I am supposed to be. He overcomes me, tossing me around and banishing me beyond all I’ve ever known. The moment I kissed him, I left behind what I knew. I let the wave pull me away. I gave into the current. Now I am lost in the middle of the ocean, and the waves are gone.

It is still.