Almost

I.

He is the boy who smiles at you when you are too tired to notice. He is the boy who teases you when the other girls look on with jealousy hidden beneath their fake laughs. He is the boy who reaches for your attention while you grasp at a different boy’s love.

II.

You didn’t know you cared about him until he laughs while the girl beside him insults you. You didn’t know you cared until his fingers are tangled in her hair and his smile is no longer an arrow that always aims for you.

III.

He is beside you again and sending his smile across a crowded room so that you can catch it in your opened palms. His hand is moving across your skin and your breath is catching in your throat and you think maybe the lost boy has found his way home. You think maybe you could shelter him from the storm that used to destroy you. You think maybe you could be his haven.

IV.

He is helping you with more than a math problem and holding more than a calculator in his hand. You’re whispering are you okay when you find yourself searching for his happiness instead of the textbook’s question. He’s holding your hands when they shake and your heart when it bleeds. He’s waiting in the halls for you and you’re waiting for him to fall but hoping he already has because heaven knows you’ve hit the ground long ago.

V.

You are walking a road that leads closer to the horizon and you are silently begging him to follow, and he almost does. He almost does but when has almost ever been enough?

VI.

He is all contradiction and change and pushing and pulling and pushing again. He is begging you to love him and apologising that he can’t do the same for you. You are pleading with him to let you heal him and promising him it’s okay if he can’t treat your wounds in the same way (because you both know he can’t).

VII.

He is far and walking further and you don’t know how to follow him when he has left you paralysed on the pavement. All you know is that you would follow him anywhere. You’d follow him anywhere if he would only stop running.

VIII.

He can’t stop running. He doesn’t know how. You want to tell him you’d run with him if only he’d let you. He is too far away to hear.

IX.

He turns back but only briefly. His eyes meet yours, but they are no longer filled with affection, only affliction.

X.

He is the boy who runs from you. He is the boy who left you drowning in your own blood, a heart he’d crushed lying crumbled beside you. He is the boy who doesn’t look back. The boy who is too much of a coward to. He is the boy whose love you reach for while he grasps for another girl’s attention. He is the boy whose love does not exist.

❀❀❀❀❀

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