I think the scent of bug spray on my palms will now forever remind me of you and the late night (early morning) we spent sitting in your car, drawing awfully unskillful portraits on the back of each other’s hands in dim light and 3 a.m. stillness. (I wonder if you could tell that doodling on your skin was just an excuse to touch you.) I wanted so badly to let my fingers find yours as we laid back in our seats and peeked out the rolled down windows at the infinite stars scattered above us in the early August night sky. I told you I wouldn’t kiss you, because I know my heart and how relentlessly it would replay how your lips felt on mine, and how it would ache knowing you couldn’t be mine, so I let you kiss my cheek instead, and the half a moment that I felt your unshaven face brush mine in the middle of the street at five in the morning feels like a fake memory. When you looked at me, I wanted to hide, because I was too afraid to read what words might’ve been written in your eyes, but I felt so content listening to the deep tone of your voice mix with the obnoxiously loud crickets singing in the trees surrounding us. I could’ve sat there with you till the stars disappeared and the sun took their place, but you walked me back home, and you left in the dark, and now I’m sitting in my bed thinking about how the hours between 2 and 5 a.m. have never felt so full.
Written by
Madisen Kuhn 25/Cisgender Female/Charlottesville, VA