I asked for someone who will stay close to me. Someone who can laugh and tease me as much as he can hold me. I asked for someone like you. You kiss me when I hurt myself. When I hit my arm on the coffee table, you grabbed it and placed your lips on it like it was nothing. Well, it was nothing to you. When you asked me to grab you a drink from the cooler, you grabbed my hand in yours and held it to your lips until I said yes. You always sit next to me, so close our legs touch, even when there's four feet of bench to sit on. And all at once I have the feeling that you are trying to send me a message, the message that you do have feelings, but I also sense that this all means nothing to you. I can't tell which feeling is instinct and which is insecurity, which is closer to truth or farther away. I doubt anything I feel is the full truth. I realized a long time ago that I cannot trust what I feel.

You flirt with every other girl you meet. But not like you do with me. At least, I think so. There are so many variables. When it's just you and I, you say things you don't ever say. When we were watching the fireworks last week, after you coerced me into sitting exactly right next to you, you said things that I may never forget. That you began to realize that you missed me far more than you thought. This is how you are when we're alone. Then, when we're with a group, you talk and joke with me like a friend, but you still sit with me, nudge me with your feet, talk and flirt with me more than the other girls around, you do still flirt with them, you stare at me, everyone has caught you staring at me. And everyday I'm hearing at least one other person tell me that you must have feelings for me, you simply must!

Our friends, my friends, my parents, all of these numbering at least a dozen people, have within the past week, pulled me aside and asked what was going on between us. When I say "nothing", their shocked faces and whispered confessions of witnessing your stares rebuke my assumption that you feel nothing for me. Sometimes you treat me with disdain, other times with affection and love, both these treatments mixing in with one another until I can't tell if you're confessing love or hate for me, or confessing nothing at all and I reprimand myself for assuming that anything you do means anything, that the most likely scenario is that I am nothing to you, and then I wonder if I am missing the meaningful moments altogether and all these thoughts and hundreds of thousands of others come crashing through my head everytime you look at me and then once again when you look away, forming this huge, cacophonous, bewildering mass of everything that's happened within the last five minutes and how it relates to everything that happened five days ago and everything one friend has just whispered to me and everything my other friend has confessed and how it all fits together and it's like a puzzle but some of the pieces are invisible and others are far too big to fit and hold very little of the picture and some pieces are almost microscopic and hold the most important parts of the image and there's no picture on the box to go off of, there's not even a box, it's like I'm sitting underneath a chute that drops more pieces of the puzzle on me, sometimes huge heaps and sometime single pieces, so I wonder what I'm missing if I'm missing anything and some of the pieces are from other puzzles so I don't know which ones even matter to me at all, and this is how my head is every second of every minute of every day unbeknownst to everyone around me.

This is how you make me feel.