Inappropriate Eyes, Wandering Fingertips

Are thoughts like these wrong? Is it wrong to feel this way about you? To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about you, but I know how I look at you and I know what I think when I do.

And you have no idea, you don’t see me looking at you the way I do.

Is it wrong to look at you like that?

You don’t realise it, you sense nothing. Even when our eyes meet you have no idea. You don't suspect for an instant just how amazed I am by your skin alone – so smooth, pale and unblemished. Skin yet untouched by time and unmarked by the hurt of years, without the scars left behind from wounds of heartbreak or disappointment.

As I look at you I know instantly what your skin would feel like to touch. I know, even though I would never dare to...

I lie. I did dare. Once.

You slept; the dead weight of your arm lay across my side, the warmth of your body against mine. I could feel the slow beat of your heart ever so slightly against my back.

I watched you while you slept. You looked so beautiful. And I couldn’t help myself.

I knew I shouldn’t, more than that I knew that you wouldn’t know if I did because you were so fast asleep. Or so I hoped.

I reached out carefully and touched you, ran my fingers along your neck and down to your ribs, to the place I have always thought is the most achingly vulnerable part of the body, the curve of the waist, the space between the end of the ribs and the beginning of the hip bone. I can hardly stand to look at it, let alone run my fingers along it. But I did. And it was almost unbearable.

You didn’t notice, or if you did you pretended not to. Either way, I’m thankful. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it if you had woken or indicated you felt my touch. I would have been too vulnerable then, too exposed, my insides cut open and spread out for inspection. No, I wouldn’t have been able to ever look at you again if that had happened.

As I did this, watching you sleep, running my fingertips along your skin, I thought about how when you talk to me – always about nothing in particular – I am stunned by the tiny, tiny lines that appear on your face, like markings on a blank canvas. And then they disappear again, a mere hint of years to come. Seeing them makes me feel like I’ve suddenly burst out laughing in aloud in public, a loud squawk bursting out of me and then disappearing.

I’m not sure if it’s you exactly, I am certainly not ‘in love’ with you in any way. I’m beyond such thoughts, I’m too far down the road already to pass time with such naïve sentiments, or more accurately you could say I’m too jaded and cynical. I think it’s more of an infatuation...with these characteristics of yours that I am all too aware we do not share.

Then a small tight hand of fear grabs my heart and squeezes it. Sharply and quickly like an ant bite – what if I’m wrong? What if I actually do like you? What then? Would that be wrong? If I know that looking at you the way I do is wrong, then to actually like you...

But I don’t even know you. You are practically a stranger to me. No, not practically, literally. So even if my fear was true, then any affection for you would be based on my own little idea of you and my collection of assumptions I have linked together in my mind.

And yet.

The moment, which did not actually exist beyond the twirling of my own thoughts, fled from my grasp.

And I had been right. I really had known all along – what it would feel like to touch your skin. It hurt my fingertips. And I loved it.

I stopped.

I got up and walked away, and I didn’t look back.

Even if I had stayed a little longer, even if you had looked at me and reciprocated my childish sentiments, eventually reality would have conspired, schemed and plotted to destroy everything. It always does.

So I walked away and I didn’t look back. And I’ll keep walking away, over and over again, because it’s the only thing that makes sense.

...