come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

i fell in love with the first boy to ever approach my porch, and me sitting down on the front step, my grade schools knees bare for him to see. yet i can’t recall the face of that biblically-named kid who used to come to my house, and once told me he was dressing up like kiss for halloween and i pretended to know what that meant. he would walk around the block several times a day, i thought he was waiting for me to come outside, i didn’t think he would call me the next day with excuses. that was before i had ever touched anyone, back then i didn’t catalog the body parts of boys i found intriguing. i guess, the first hand i ever held: it must have been seventh grade- when i thought being asked to dance meant something. when i would almost miss the bus after school just to catch a glimpse of my first guitar-playing infatuation, to fuel my sanguine daydreams. when did i start expecting the implausible? that mask of hope must have vaporized into the halls of my high school, or maybe when i realized that everyone who told me i was beautiful in seventh grade did it as a pointless joke. i gave up for eight years. in my twenties, i fell in love with the first boy who laid on the driveway and gazed at the stars with me. he had graceful looking fingers, like they should be used for something frivolous rather than pragmatic, like playing the piano instead of holding a steering wheel. i never told him these things when we sat on the concrete and wrote on it with chalk, when it was dark outside. but i knew, i could feel it the first time he grabbed my hand underneath the topsheet. i am so glad it never went farther than that, i have these lucid flashbacks of forearms and earlobes that haven’t been muddled by sorrow or transgression. my heart is still young, i still believe that one day he will come walking up my street and the next day, he will be ruining my life.