[Someone to exist with]

Every year on your birthday,

I ran to the shop just around the corner.

The shop whose splintered and hurricane-beaten wood reminded me of your eyes.

The corner where I’d watch as you rode past on your peach tinted bike each evening.

I ran to the shop and picked out the shiniest, most you-worthy gift I could find.

I would use my tooth fairy money,

and my Santa money,

and my birthday money,

and any Pennies and dimes I scraped from the inside of my parents cracked leather couch.

And I would wait patiently on the corner until you rode by, as always.

Your head nodding in the way a bird’s coo welcomes in the morning’s sun,

your smile illuminating the dark beaten path I had scraped myself upon on the way here.

See, the issue isn’t that I got you the present.

The issue isn’t that you accepted it with gleaming cheeks bathed in sunset.

The issue lies within the now empty couch cushions.

It lies within the tire-shaped gravel tracks you left behind for my eyes to trace a few minutes later.

It lies within the way it had become a tradition for me to bring you

what I thought encompassed my heart

and a courteous cloth-cased tradition to you.

It lies within the way I loved you when you weren’t looking.

And in that moment you were looking,

with your eyes meeting mine in a way that sent shivers flickering down my spine,

It lied in the way you gorge yourself in uncomfortable eye contact

and I simply stood there feeling appreciated.

I realize now that my extensive habit of staring out my window,

Waiting for the only true beauty I’d seen beyond the earth herself,

Was simply because I just wanted someone to exist with

And you were on your way home from school.