The last time I liked someone, really liked someone, it was just like this.
I was never an early riser except for the summer of 2018 when I woke up everyday hungry for the sight of his freckles; his khakis with the torn back pocket; his crooked teeth. The prowl for a glimpse of these delicacies rose washed my days and sustained me.
“Aloof” isn’t a word I wear (and I hate it still), but when it came to Brennan, you’d never know I spent my hours orchestrating opportunities to pass him in the stairwell of Gordon White, at Emo’s, and in line at Bennu. Aloof. Even when he brought me doughnuts in the morning, when we exchanged numbers, went to a concert, went to bed—even when he recorded a cover of Feeling Good because I told him how much I love Nina Simone—aloof. I scanned the stack of love notes from Sweden on his desk with the detachment of someone who wasn’t all-consumed.
He reached for me a dozen times and shy of offering him a rusty nail I found on the train tracks in Marfa, shy of the diorama I painted for him in an altoid tin, and shy of sending him a postcard from Utah with nothing more than a playlist on the back, I could never reach back.

Aloof.

So he never really knew me and when he began to seek out someone less withholding, I couldn’t bring myself to say everything that had been burning me up or even the simpler truth: “there’s a spring coiled inside me and I don’t know what will come loose if I stop applying pressure.” Years later, I’d see him at Nickel City, Easy Tiger, or in the Sanchez courtyard and feel the spring start to give. He moved and I forgot. A fluke, I decided. Aloof is not my word. I forgot all about the slinky in my throat that had so often threatened to stretch itself long and expose me as the lovesick fool I had so masterfully pretended to not be.

But then we sat on opposite sides of a window at Cherrywood and in spite of myself, I ignored you. Until you came up to talk to my friends and I found an excuse to leave the table. You sat outside and in my periphery. I felt myself clamp down on the spring unfurling between my lungs and aorta. I focused my attention on anything else and prayed: “please, this time—if only this once—don’t let me be misunderstood.” Until then, never noticing how starved I’d been for your tattoos, your brown eyes, your gestures.