It was a cold and humid November night, the kind that I hated but all in all it didn’t really matter at the time. He stood in front of me, relaxed, weight on one foot. I was sitting on an empty chair adjacent to the big wooden doors which we often came in and out of for nights in the last few months. It had become familiar, once a strange and uncomfortable place, turned into just another hang-out night after night. He was looking at me, I was pretending not to notice. My gaze was focused on the cars by the side of the road, the trees, the yellow flickering street lamps that barely shed any light on the empty lots and dark roads. I pretended to be thinking, but there was nothing on my mind, really. There was only silence between us, which was frequent. Silence. We had both kinds. The uncomfortable and the comfortable kind. This one, would be the comfortable kind.
“You’ve big feet,” He said breaking the silence. I tore my gaze off whatever it was I was pretending to be looking at and turned my attention towards him. If what he wanted was my attention, he sure got it. I scoffed at the random remark. He opened his mouth again to talk.
“And a big forehead…” I stared at him, not so much as shocked but more of amused.
“I don’t have big feet, I was wearing shoes a size bigger than I should have been.” He didn’t reply.
“You notice everything, don’t you?” I continue. He slightly sticks out his bottom lip and nods.
“Yeah…”
“Why?” I ask, curiosity dripping from my voice.
“I don’t know… I just notice things about you.” I try to hide the fact that I might be blushing at this point.
“And you find the need to let me know all the things you notice about me?”
“It’s not my fault you don’t notice things about me.”
”Maybe I do and I just don’t say everything that comes into my mind.” I say in a matter-of-factly tone. I see curiosity slowly being etched into his face. I’m sure he was about to ask me soon, if I do notice things about him, and if I did, what were they. I had to say something before he had the chance to.
“Besides… They say people with big foreheads mean they’re smarter—” an amused smirk appears on his lips but our conversation was cut short. The big wooden doors next to us opened, our friend calling us to come in. Their favorite tv show was about to start.
We always stayed in the same place. The room had no real beds, just comfortable mattresses on the floor, each perfectly fit for two people. On TV was Man vs Food. Boys and their food. We were lying in bed, not touching, but close enough. It wasn’t even close to being PG. I was pretending to watch the man on TV take on a big pizza burger bacon thing, with the frequent distraction of checking social networking sites on my phone and his scent radiating off of him. I knew his scent so well, that’s how often I was so near him all the time. It was etched into my memory. Even when we weren’t together, I knew how he smelled. He smelled of fresh cologne and cigarettes. It didn’t smell as disgusting as I would think. I hated the smell of cigarettes but on him, it was, well, it easily became one of my favorite smells in the world. The scent of him. That was one of the things I noticed about him. I noticed, too, that his hair was always so shaggy like he just got out of bed, that he had a sort of funny lopsided walk that added to his appeal.
My train of thought was interrupted, my sight went dark and that’s when I realized that he probably got bored watching the show. He placed his army cap on my head, the flap in front completely covered half of my face. I lift it off a bit.
“What was that for?”
“It looks cute on you,” he says but then he quickly adds in a teasing tone,
“Plus it covers your big forehead.” My jaw drops as if I’m insulted. He laughs as I playfully shove him telling him to shut up. He pokes me at my side, causing me to jolt. I laugh, he laughs, I poke at him and he pokes at me. We have become the cliche tickle fight. Oh, god. We were no longer not PG. We were PG. When the tickle fight died down, we were closer to each other than we had been before that. He pulled down the army cap on my head once more, covering more than nearly half my face. He pinched my nose and touched my cheek.
”I like your forehead, your nose, your freckles…” He said. I fought the urge to smile. I completely forgot that we weren’t alone, that our friends were there next to us, that the TV was on and the man was now taking on a different kind of high calorie meal. No one else existed except him and me.
“and I like your ridiculously big feet.” He finished. I gave a smile and a scoff at the same time. It worried me that he easily noticed so many things about me. I prayed to god he wouldn’t notice that, that night I decided that he would be a keeper, and all the teasing and bantering we did was something I could get used to.
It’s been a year since then. There’s no longer any teasing, no silly bantering, no cheesy little tickle fights. They have all been replaced by silence, once more. Although this time, it was neither the comfortable nor the uncomfortable silence. It was just that. Silence. I would be lying if I said I didn’t see it coming. Looking back now, all the good stuff had bad stuff lying in between. They were small, minuscule details, easily missed, easily blinded to midst all the happy things. It’s been a year, and although I don’t remember very much (my brain slowly erased him bit by bit), there are those random times I’m hurled back into the past, reliving the good things. Forget the bad things. It was the good things that matter the most. It was you, and me. It was, for a brief moment in time, everything we had hoped for it to be.
