Infatuation With a Sleepless Boy
A once upon a time of curiosity, play, and pulling away.
You close your eyes and see an image of his face — starry eyes, dimples, straight nose, crackling smile. Little clouds of curly hair fall below his jawline. You’ve curated this image from encounters in the smoking area and in brief moments at the lobby. Plenty of times you look at him for a few seconds while he talks to someone, just so you can save mental images that you will otherwise not see.
I’m thinking about you, again, and I’m hoping this is over, soon.
The day that you met isn’t something you remember. You wish that you met in another way, though. Like maybe, in being introduced by his girlfriend to you, in a universe where you were friends with her. Better yet, in a place where you will not want a piece of him if you can’t be with him at all.
But, wait, wait — who said anything about having anyone? That has never been part of the bargain, has it? You’ve always known that you cannot — and are not — supposed to touch him; that’s why you never added him on Facebook months and months ago. The boundaries are clear as daylight.
Fate initiates a game
Chance comes that you are qualified to share a conversation with your crush. Your circles overlap, you find yourselves in the same network. Social grace prescribes that you exchange a word or two — after all, you’re only a few feet apart from each other and literally in the same bay.
One day his message appears in your mail: “Are you okay?”
You say you’re fine, you say you’re going through something in your life, and you say more than what you mean to.
“I wish I can have long conversations with you,” you ask.
He opens a small window to his universe. You see his drawings, laugh at his humor, and joyfully listen to his tales.
“We can collaborate. I can draw and you can think about accompanying words,” he suggests.
The idea of “getting together” in an intellectual, artistic manner excites you.
(Spoiler: you never collaborate on anything anyway.)
Curiosity and Play
Several afternoons you stay late just to have these moments. You exchange thoughts and ideas and talk about strange things like bipolarity, marijuana, sleep apnea, and existentialism. You leave a trace of “I like you” wherever you speak or move — no less in that cinnamon roll which you deliver to his work desk. The thrill and the challenge both have got you. And there’s just no way you’re taking off that poker face and stop acting “cool” about it.
Most remarkable are moments when you catch — or steal — a glance at him and you find dark circles under his eyes, and then remember what you talked about recently: the figures in his waking dreams, cluttered thoughts, fears. It feels like you have seen his soul through the facade.
You have simply wanted to take a look and see what’s on his mind — now you fall endlessly to a bottomless pit. The more you hear about him, the more you complete an image of him, complete with a warm mouth, an intricate mind, and body parts that you can almost touch.
The raw interest that you’ve had for a yet-another-tall-dark-and-handsome-guy-with-messy-hair becomes an infatuation.
The more you know, the more you begin to feel, and the more you become curious to see. You start to want.
His witty stances, his humor, his stories, his ideas that make you laugh like a child — they’ve become familiar. You want to find him and yourself in a corner where you’ve never been before. You cut open into deeper parts in the name of fun, because it’s cool, because it’s absolutely entertaining, because it’s fascinating to do things you don’t expect yourself to ever get into — and most of all — because you just really like him, and anything that would retain his attention is something you can hold on to.
One day you find yourself wanting to know how perfume smelled on his skin. You wonder how it must feel like to have his lips on any part of your skin. How hard will he grab you on the waist when he pulls you close? Will he moan or make a sound at all when your bodies intertwine?
You know that these are unthinkable thoughts. They are not supposed to be. They can’t be. They’re highly personal thoughts of yours, called fantasies, and these are things you ought to keep to yourself. These things are not the sort of pieces that you include in your game of chess. You leave them in a corner for you to painfully carry.
It is a world of cool and fun and you ought to know that. Your sugar and honey daydreams and teenage fantasies are too romantically surreal. It is important to remember that you never meant to have anything else other than pieces of his thoughts.
You have already taken what you wanted — that long ass piece of deep conversation. You have given him more than what you initially wanted — an appetite for a special treat. There is nothing for you to pine for. There is nothing more to take.
You can just close your eyes and picture a sleepless boy with a deep voice that you prefer to listen to over Spotify. Hell is what’s in his mind, according to him, and you can just picture the next creepy or witty (or both) stuff he’s gonna create. Just let yourself be amazed by his disturbia and internal chaos (which you find a little cute) but don’t try to mess with it and invite him to share a mental world with you. Never mind how much you like his sleeve of tattoos. Stop dreaming about a moment in time where your minds and bodies collide in perfect rhythm that would never reach a point of bore — because you’re both crazy weedheads who endlessly fascinate each other.
He is only a personal curation; a collection of selected parts; a half-imagined, half scantily seen personality; an object of limerence.
