you will think too much when you are kissing the girl down the hall.

you will dance with her, half-drunk and half-joking, and something foreign in you will ignite. you will blatantly ask her to be your girlfriend just to gauge her reaction. you will curiously perch yourself on her lap and beam when she praises your vocabulary. you are more drunk but you are still half-joking.

you will think of the way she runs her hands through your hair and over your shoulders. you will remember how she feels about touching things, how she only touches what is important to her, what she doesn't want to forget. you will think about this when she asks if she can kiss you. you will think about this when her dry, drunken lips find yours and you will think about it when the pad of her thumb grazes the waistband of your jeans. you will think about how your jeans look, pooled on her carpet.

you will think about the time she told you how fluently she reads body language, how people's feet point to what they want. you will step on your own toes in protest every time you see her in the cafeteria. you will think about the time she laughs and says, "god, you're so submissive, it's adorable" and you will think about how naked she makes your clumsy body feel, no matter what you're wearing, like each flippant comment peels back another layer of skin and muscle and tendon and bone until there is nothing left of you but her whispers, evaporating into the november air.

you will think about how she makes you feel like a bad metaphor. like the fluffy rhyme schemes that she bemoans.

you will worry about her panic attacks. you will want to remind her to breathe. you want to make her chase you but you worry about her shin splints.

you will think about the song you'd told her you wanted to lose your virginity to. you will think of how she scrolls through her music library methodically until she finds it and kisses your neck for four minutes and fifty seconds so you can sing along.

you will think of her words. you will wonder if she writes about you. you will wonder how she would feel if she knew you write about her. you will grieve how miserably your feeble musings stack up to her well-timed, self-aware prose and you will draw parallels between this and the rest of her and how everything she says is profound and every gesture is intentional and how small and stupid she makes you feel, and you are gasping into the darkness beyond her ears, whimpering under her mouth, shivering under her quilt.

you will think about the hand she stretches precariously over her shoulder to you just before she is sleeping beside you. you will think about her fingertips. you will think about her hair.

your thoughts will be clouds of her cigarette smoke.