They Warned Me About Boys Like You

They warned me about you.

The boy with brilliant sandy eyes and a mischievous smile. He wears his birthmark like a trademark on the top of his left cheek. He is the one who knows every single person at the crowded bar, with girls beaming at him with half-smiles that threaten you like a loaded gun. You try not to feel the pity that the bartender serves with your tonic, and you chase down your drink with a heavy dose of denial. Drink. Drink. Repeat. Repeat. Don’t leave room in your stomach for hope to grow.

Our friends cautioned me to think long and hard about kissing you. That I should, at one point or another, stop kissing you with coated illusions of creating something more. That I should stop kissing you before you bury yourself under my skin. That late at night, I will be kissing your lips, your neck and your chest; but I will not be kissing your heart. It will never be your heart.

He will leave you to pieces, they said. Take you to bed and give you his body out of common courtesy. He will sink his hands into your thighs and light lanterns along your spine. He tells you that he wants your silhouette but nothing more. You nod and kiss him harder. Mistake his urgency as your intimacy. You hear the thump-thump-thump pounding in his chest and let him fill your veins with a new kind of poison. You chase the contact high that comes with the warmth of his skin. Each kiss lights up your eyes like an electric blub. You want to tell him that you crave to be the bandage to his hurt, and let your hands guide him through his blur of deformity.

But darling, you know you can only have him in the night. Once the daylight breaks through those curtains, you are nothing more than an anxious fragile girl dreaming with a careless heart. You watch him redress himself and ask if he wants to stay for coffee. Five more minutes, you whisper with your eyes. Five more minutes before reality jolts you awake with barrels of cruel disappointment. But he shakes his head and says he can’t because of work. You do not act surprised. Whatever happens between you happens in darkness. You know better than that.

And so you dig a ditch in your chest and bury every trace of hope left in your bed sheets. Hide every knot tangled beneath your ribs and swallow the bitterness that lingers on your tongue. Let every kiss evaporate and subside into the bottom of your wine glass. Loneliness has no voice.

Remember that there is no our. There is only you, and there is only him.

They warned me about you.