it has been years since she learned how to make peace with her high school crush on you until it no longer stung
but you still talk every now & then, and every now & then she still finds herself quietly slipping in a flirtatious joke or two
playfully, discreetly, framed like a tease but the undertones are simply left unsaid, tucked away like your little secret
today she dates a man, long-term and loving, yet she knows she still does it to you every now & then just to feel something again
even if it meant feeling 15 years old again, in her pinafore and bata sneakers with her painfully simplistic understanding of love

to her, women are beautiful but impossibly out of reach - she is at peace having her daydreams about them from afar
she panics at the thought of actual reciprocation; internalizing past heartbreaks had taught her that she was unwanted
attractive only through the shattered lens of the male gaze, she comes to believe tenderness is something one must be deserving of
her younger uninhibited self escapes once more every now & then - it's harmless, she tells herself, she only flirts with you for fun
she knows all the old poems she wrote you have been shelved away in her archives to gather dust
but years pass and she learns to truly stifle the yearning, to bury the lines between platonic/romantic love in a pit to lay flowers atop

yet it was in a new flame she found that same tenderness in, this time navigating unfamiliar spaces between admiration/attraction
quietly and unassumingly it burned in one-sided flickers until it eventually fizzled out in smoke when they moved 2 hours away
but from the smoke arose a lingering longing for the same thrill of the playful back-and-forth, sneaking glances like a secret
alone, she slowly understands what she had not known before, piecing her feelings together as a sexually confused dr.frankenstein
little weeds started to bloom once more in the backyard, until she heard from a friend of a friend that they were back in town again

after a long year spent coming to terms with herself, her mind wanders to what if they had never gone / if they stayed all along
birds whispered that there was more to the story than she knew, but she knows she wanted there to be something more
or was it just the copious amounts of self-deluded coping mechanisms she surrounded herself with to forget?
perhaps she hoped the pining might lead her someplace exciting, where she could give in and let them lead the way across for once
but temptation risks stepping into the unfamiliar and she seems content not wanting to let go of the comforts of speculation, fantasy
even more so, how could she know what a woman's reciprocity looked like if she had never been subject to it before?