Beginning

The beginning was perfect...

I met you in a club on one of those summer nights that make you think you might live forever. The air was crisp, but warm enough that I was able to wear just a little black dress and not have goosebumps trailing across my still-pale skin. You were at the bar, tall, dark haired and handsome, like all perfect strangers should be. And as I hauled myself through the hot, clammy crowd to the front of the queue, you caught my eye and smiled.

Thinking back to that night is like trying to remember a dream. It's hard to remember it clearly, to remember it without letting everything that came after distort the memory. I was so in control that night. You wore a red jacket, your hands were speckled with paint, you smoked Camel Lights. You led me to the dance floor, danced with me, hands sliding across my hips. I pushed you away, flittered back out into the smoking garden. You followed me out, stood on one side, near the gate and watched my every move (later, much later, you would say "Sometimes I feel like I've spent my entire summer watching you across other people" and I would melt into your arms). The way you looked at me made me feel like maybe I was beautiful, maybe I was something other than just a girl at a club.

After that, events blur. Days tumbled into one another, I was caught up in working and drinking and other boys, you had your art and your drugs and the multiple girls with pink hair. But you were there, in the back of my mind, and when I bumped into you in town that day I had that strange sense of inevitability - as if I'd been waiting for this to happen all along. We went for coffee, although I don't drink coffee. You ordered yours strong and black and I ordered one with an impossibly long name in the hope that the longer the name, the less it would taste like actual coffee. It turned out it didn't matter anyway, because being near you robbed me of the ability to taste and there was a knot so tightly wound in my throat that I could barely swallow and left my drink mostly untouched.

What did we talk about? I don't know. But then, it was never about words with us. It was about touch. It was about your fingertips brushing mine as you reached for sugar, about your knees pressing against mine. And later it became your tongue tracing circles on my neck, my hands tangled in your hair (and later, much later, it became my fingernails scraping my initials into your back, your teeth drawing blood from my lips).

Sometimes I think, when I let myself think about these things, very early in the morning when I can't sleep or very late at night when I've had too much to drink, what it would have been like if, after the coffee when we walked along the canal and you took my face in your hands and told me you hadn't stopped thinking about me since the first time you'd seen me press myself though the crowds and fall against the bar, I had said "Thank you for a lovely evening" and walked away. If I had pressed stop, at that moment, and ended it so that everything was perfectly preserved. So that the words "it might have been..." still held true. So that you were still a tall, dark, handsome boy the way all perfect strangers should be. So that I was still a girl who's heart didn't know it could be broken.