Give Me Peace

What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?

--Alec Trevelyan

I am undone.  Words failed me once again this evening.  Despite my every effort it seems that I've played the same game and lost the same way.  I don't know when to put the beginning of this story, but it doesn't matter so I'll skip to the end.  There is a princess in a tower.  I crouch in front of her, looking up into a face so beautiful it could disarm a dragon.  The only light streams in through a window behind her, shinning through her hair and bouncing off her cheek.  I have one finger on her chin, staring at her, speechless.  The original plan was nothing but a single step:  move in for a kiss, but don't quite kiss her.  I was going to hover inches away, dragging out the moment before our lips touched.  However, while I was still drawing her close and too far away for the hovering when she said "no kissing either."  I had been previously trying to get her to sing.

More words were exchanged, and the content of those words was so unexpected my mind ground to a halt.  I had no words.  I had no filler words.  No quips, no dry humor.  I'd brought a pocketknife to a gun fight and now stood bleeding from the left side of my chest.  I held her there, while I could, with a hand on her shoulder and a finger on her chin, to at least draw the moment out, this moment that was the closest thing to intimacy that I would get.  One moment became several, and then they were gone.

I hear girls like this referred to as "the ones that got away," and I have more than one, but to be totally honest with you, I never really had this one.  I thought I did once, long ago, and briefly, and the exuberance I felt in that moment is something I compare to arriving on the shores of heaven.  I wanted for nothing, then, but I was mistaken.  The later realization of the depth of that mistake led me, like a zombie, to a restaurant in atlantic city wherein I swiftly consumed every beer that I was handed and ended the night with the faint taste of vomit on my lips.

Tonight, I love her.  It was a risk I knew of when I came and I came anyway.  I've never had so much be said while so much remains unsaid.  She told me not to look so emo.  I thought my face was expressionless, but apparently I have not the mask I need.  Tomorrow, or  perhaps a day more in the future, love will settle down into infatuation, or lust, or something else that is manageable.  I will drink rum with friends at bars and her name will come up and I'll nod or raise my glass.  Her face will flash through my mind, and I might even picture her blushing under the moonlight, and then the words will continue their course downstream as I sit there on the barstool, shackled to the status quo.


Am I, as I am and will be, someone she would ever fall in love with, perhaps if the planets were aligned just right and other guys weren't around?  Or am I instead just another inconvenient suitor, just another guy who wants but can't have, who will never stand in the doorway of a fresh apartment watching the streetlight bounce off an empty wine glass as he listens to faint sounds of her breathing in the next room?  If I told her how I feel, would it ruin my chances forever, or would she even believe me?  I don't know.  I don't know if she knows, and if she does know, I don't know if she would tell me, especially if the answer to that first question is no.  Yet, that is the most important answer.  And she might.  So I might, ask, at least, if the words don't fall out of my mind first.

I have minutes to decide whether to post this, and the consequences could be many.  Other girls could read this.  She could read this.  A lot of people actually read this --and here goes the battery.  Well, Wolverine would push the button.