Stranger

You are snippets of stories, confined and constrained to minutes and seconds at a time. Today, tomorrow, and then next week. Some days you are just face value. A smile, a wave, a conversation about the weekend, and then a hurried good-bye. Or homework. God, all that homework we have to talk about. If ‘homework’ were actually a subtle, subliminal code for ‘sex’, my very early mornings would be filled with fucking you in public libraries. But it’s not. It’s words and words on printed paper, of the history of the social impact of racial identities, and the expounding of relationships from historical perspectives of race, pretenses initially raised, and eventual outcomes. The only thing that comes close to ‘sex’ in our conversations is the value of gender influence in the history of the societal perspective of race.

You are homework questions I don’t understand, answers on tests, early morning greetings, and casual conversations. You are fragments of a memoir incomplete. You know that feeling you get when you start reading a book, but you have to continually keep putting it down because life gets in your way? That is you.

And I would have willingly drowned in you in one sitting if it were possible, if life let me.

But we’ve drifted apart so suddenly, and I don’t know why. And like those wretched novels that end so abruptly, teasing you and then leaving you hanging, I am breathless of want.

Now when I think of you, I realize that, essentially, you are a stranger.

You are the absurd movie star in this really strange yet captivating film. And as much as I long for you, I know just as much about you as I can get from some half-assed fansite.

I don’t know you. And you don’t know me.

Yet, I think of your face. And your smile. And your weird quirks. And I wonder about your opinion on certain things. There is a little pocket of space in my head where I keep questions that I want to ask you. Useless, you can say, because when I see you, I forget it all.

Sometimes when you pop into my head, I wonder what it’s like to run my finger across your jawline. Or how your fingers would feel in between mine. What it would feel like to kiss that space on your neck, right below your ear. And how you’d feel if I ran my hands across your chest, or through your hair. How it would feel to have your weight on top of mine. I think about your quiet lips and how I want to kiss them, gently and passionately all at the same time. I want to wrap my arms around your neck and feel your naked flesh on mine. Your hands running all over, and your lips on my skin, tingling with the angst of wanting you more and more. I want to feel your breath in my ear, and I want to look into your bright and tired eyes — into your soul.

It is at about this point that I realize that I am so tumultuously and insatiably attracted to you.

Or perhaps it is the idea of you.

I can never quite figure it out, because I don’t know you still, stranger.