He was lying on the futon, watching Battlestar Galactica. I was in my nightgown sitting in his windowsill, smoking a cigarette, bored, restless & lonely. I stared out the window, looked down at the ground.
“Do you think if I fell out of your window, I would die?” I asked him.
“I don’t know if you’d die, but you would get seriously hurt that’s for sure.” He mumbled.
I took a long drag from my cigarette and looked back out the window. The street was empty and dark. The only illumination came from a single streetlight about half a block from where I was sitting. I stared at that streetlight for a long time, feeling as alone as ever. After a minute or so, I began to feel his eyes penetrate my core. I looked at him. He was all limbs spread in every direction. The flame in his eyes told me more than I wanted to know.
“Do you ever feel like a moth?” I asked him.
“In what sense?”
“I dunno, like do you ever feel like you’re always attracted to something that is out to destroy you in the end? Like no matter where you end up, you find yourself hitting the same lightbulb over and over as if it could save you… When really it will be the death of you?”
He looked at me quizzically. Electricity filled in the gaps between us.
“Why are you thinking about that?”
He reminded me of myself - always answering a question with a question.
I looked back at the streetlight and I could see the silhouettes of insects all around it.
“Oh, I was just noticing the streetlight over there and all of the bugs surrounding it. Don’t you ever feel like that though?” I asked him again.
“Well when you put it that way, I’ve always felt like that, yeah.”
“I have a book of poems that my friend Emma gave to me a while back - there’s a poem in there that reminds me of feeling like that. It’s called ‘the lesson of the moth’. I’d like to read it to you sometime.”
I took a drag from my cigarette and looked at him again. Beautiful, he was in that moment. Just lying there listening to me, I felt like I was being heard for the first time. Battlestar Galactica had then become just a fuzz of white noise. I stared at him in silence.
“What are you staring at?” I smiled.
“You.”
“Why?”
“You’re beautiful.”
I looked back at the streetlight and exhaled a long puff of smoke.
Minutes rolled by. I couldn’t bear to look at him again. I have a hard time being seen.
“Looking at you is like listening to a symphony.” He said at last.
I was caught more by the charm of how he was more absorbed by the moment of me and not the boring television series that blurred in the background, never mind the romance of what had just escaped from his mouth.
Because I knew I wasn’t the first girl he’s looked at like that, and I wouldn’t be the last.
But dammnit, he sure knew how to make my skin melt and my heart burn.