Your Boomerang

It will happen in math class when the boy next to you touches your leg and electricity freckles your skin like fireworks. You’ll be holding your breath and hoping the people around you can’t hear your heart as it riots in your chest. And you’ll smile at him because he won’t be paying attention to anyone else and his closeness will feel foreign to you, but he will feel unnaturally familiar, like déjà vu and a new recurring dream.

His smile will return like dawn every time he sees you in the halls and your heartbeats will grow anarchical as you attempt to hide the light that spreads across your face, mirroring the happiness that spills from his own eyes.

He will give you compliments gift wrapped with words like baby and all the words you never cared for until they fall from his lips. And you will drop your standards in the same way he will end up letting your heart slip from his fingers because his eyes are the colour of sadness, and you so desperately want to show him what healing can taste like.

And then he will grow distant, like faded ink and wilting flower petals and you will chase after him with a lifeboat and a first-aid kit. And he will be your boomerang, always leaving and coming back until one day when the wind is too strong, and he does not deem you worth the fight.

Your favourite word will be stay and your biggest fear goodbye and he will be the reason you say them, over and over again, almost as a prayer. He will be gone, and you will be in pieces, your hands too unsteady to create a mosaic.

It will happen in eleventh grade when love looks like a boy with a broken heart and your greatest mistake will be letting him carve yours up, so it bleeds just like his.

_____________

Please check out more of my poetry and prose like this: