it was easy when we first met. you were nine years old and i was younger and it was simple, the admiration from afar, our youthful innocence like white lace and dusty porcelain dolls. the music stumbled from me then, not quite formed, tripping over my fingers and over the black notes on pages we shared, too close for comfort. i was a fool. i was at once the court jester and the damsel in distress. i dangled from your words in dewy awe, stitched from top to bottom with the thread of puppy love, my felt heart swinging pendulous in the breeze. it became more difficult during the summer of green hills and salzburg when i craved your presence like an opiate. i was an addict; i was one constant delirious blush; when you sat down at our euchre table i didn't know where to look. i simultaneously followed and avoided you. my heart was a music box and yours seemed a calliope. there was so much that summer--so much painful doubt, so much heady joy, so much whispered stage presence, too much contradiction. i missed you after that. i suffered in silence, content to watch, ignoring the taut line of electricity between us and tempering my glances with a carbon dose of realism. you were a fool's-gold cathedral, an atlantis, a set of coppery green keys that fit no lock. you were determined to keep me out. we turned sixteen and i began to want all of you, want your freckles splayed out like constellations under my fingertips and your soft weight against mine. i was desperate for something i couldn't yet name. i wrote letter after letter in my mind and waited for far too long in your shadow, boiling, seething with repression and desire. i had infinite second thoughts. alone, we were conspirators, laughing teasing shadow puppets, whimsical against faded yellow wallpaper. when you asked me to be us i felt a unique gelatin thaw of relief and disappointment. for four months i was a hot air balloon in a tempest. your arm was snug and warm around my shoulders; your heartbeat throbbed in my temple. i was horribly, exquisitely afraid. you were too much and too little and i was gauche, unprepared, gawky--the ruby slippers, my prepubescent dream, fit claustrophobic and pinching around my toes. i ached to be barefoot. i began to reject satisfaction. i could map out our relationship on the dry february concrete. when you ran away that night, i sat on the steps for an hour with a dog antsy in my arms, the question whathaveidone omnipresent and loathing, hanging in the air like the stench of decay. the moment after you ended it i knew--so this is what it's like. i came home and cried out of curiosity and a sadness that i couldn't define, one that sat in my lungs like pneumonia and lingered for months. i hated and loved and resented. i vowed to never feel that way again and denied that i still felt that way about you. i moved away and crawled back with the changing tides. hearing you talk about her was like taking a bullet but i would do it again in a stolen heartbeat just to laugh with you, just to spend those four-in-the-morning moments on couches with your skin like faded cashmere, your hair like dense camel corduroy, your eyes like broken-in denim. we danced the waltz and the salsa in the dark with your hand pressed hot on my hip and i had never wanted anything more than to kiss you right that second, in your living room, your sister sitting on the couch and our parents outside drinking wine. i fell through the thin membrane of six years and tumbled, wide-eyed and glistening, into the present. my heart has facets now; i love with depth. i love through melody and through my eyes but rarely through my words. we have that in common, one of the threads that links us together, inalterable, like the sweet sweet venomous music that courses through our veins. we're also bound by history but i wouldn't erase one page.