After three blissful days of platonic romance with a nearly perfect boy, I need to cry from exhaustion and from loss. When he touches my life I light up, glowing bright like the molten red sun sinking into the ocean. The residue of the heat produced by flirting is enough to leave me charred. To walk along the beach at sunset, sharing a conversation so intimate and friendly that it bares the broken, scarred insides of my inadequacy hidden from casual view, is enough to last me the months or years it will be until I meet him again. It means so much that he asks all the right questions, knows where to thrust and when to caress, in an intellectual consumation more satisfying than the merging of our bodies that isn't to be. We are fellow travellers, perhaps too alike to be lovers and yet passionately connected through intricate neural networks. When he leaves I want nothing more than to reach out after him, send in his wake all the love and joy I feel for him, offer support and sustenance that can not begin to repay the debt I feel for the few hours of his conversation. So I mourn the loss of a boy I have never possessed, lightning I cannot hold. Though he is someone I'm destined to see for no more than a few days at a time, his absence lingers, a wound left open to air that never loses its sting. Thinking of him even when we haven't spoken for months, referencing his wisdom even when it isn't accessible, sending him love from afar even when he cannot contact. I will never be central in his life, and he will never be the center of mine, but when our orbits cross, sparks fly and magic happens. How can a girl not cry when that magic passes out of her life once again, taking another revolution that may bring us closer together or keep us far apart? My love for him cannot be written in conventional terms, neither described by poets nor analyzed by academic discourse. He is my sweet lost soul other half from another life, but in no way my match in this place and time.
Genius hero trickster god and storyteller, he teaches me lessons that make me a better person. He asks the universe the ethical implications of his own charisma and I answer with unearnéd wisdom. If he's the hero on his journey of transformation, I am Cassandra, cursed. He transforms the myth by listening to the babbling words of advice and prophecy pouring at his feet, providing the priestess an audience even when the outcomes do not change. If he is Orpheus I am Eurydice after death, a shade of partial life following the music of his footsteps. But I am neither curséd nor dead. No Penelope patiently weaving and waiting but Amazon on my own quest, chasing my own golden apples. It is just the shade of me he sees, removed from my real life into another dimension that burns more brilliant when he is there.
