Walking into first period I am a 12-year-old girl again,
Confidence turned into racing heartbeats and jumbled words.
Imaginary conversations fill my head with possibilities but nothing ever seems to escape my lips but a timid smile.
I trash my spearmint gum and begin walking back to my seat, the teacher has only just begun talking.
I take three steps before daring to look up,
by the fourth I see blue out of my peripheral...
You are looking at me.
The fifth step, I am looking at you.
And for the entirety of that second all the other faces of the room blurred and I swear the history lesson took a pause for the present and there was solely that simple look to be shared.
A look I have found to be all too familiar but yet it never comes enough to be able to fully decipher it.
It is a look of timid desire.
It is a look of fire and ice, of two elements of opposite worlds colliding.
It is a look of earth and water.
A sly romance which everyone sees but no one knows.
Water hits the shore and I am chocolate melting, I am soil eroding.
I am the tree's branches bending under the misty wind.
I am the earthquake that causes the hurricane, the tsunami.
Yet you are calm like the tranquil sea.
Your eyes the color of the shallow water on a southern beach just before the break of a gentle wave at shore in the first hour of sunrise.
I think of you, and there are butterflies.
I look at you, and they rest.
We both simultaneously break our glance as I turn to my seat.
Oh, how I wish you were sitting next to me.