Reluctant Optimism

Just over a month of making decisions that will radically impact the foreseeable future of my life. Just over a month I drove to a Walmart parking lot at midnight to meet a boy who has captured my fascination since the moment I laid eyes on him back in May. He was my student. He was my client. I saw every trace of him that could be collected in a data base and my fascination only grew stronger. Why? What is it? I never could figure out if he felt that strange instant pull the way I did but I held onto a fanciful sense of optimism. Thought maybe....but it didn't matter because he was my student. He was my client. He left one day without saying a word. He left and I always hoped he'd show his face around but I took my thoughts for foolishness. Until the day he came back. He came back with lights in his eyes and an eagerness to connect to the sense of community he has come to realize he will always crave but never the confidence to choose one worthy of his membership. The lights in his eyes quickly gave way to the stinging hunger of his mind that says I am no longer high enough. He runs to his car and comes back so sweaty and strewn about that my heart sinks through the floor back to the graveyard of the many fantasies I have had to bury. It's always the broken the bruised and the drugged. For some reason, those are always the ones that I love. He left. Later I did too. Ignored the pull from the bottom of my stomach that begged my hand to pick up the phone and my mouth to just speak some final parting words into his ear. Looking for some sort of inappropriate affair. Why? What was it?

Just over a month ago my deep seeded desires were harvested from the abandoned garden of my imagination. A message. An unexpected message from the boy who glues together crystals like it will also glue the missing pieces of himself back together. Lines and ideas fly between two hearts for hours and into the next day. The next day the lights have dimmed just enough so you can begin to see him and the lies hidden behind the beauties lined within the window to his whole. The hunger. Begging to be fed anything with the slightest sentience of a reward, no matter the consequence. We both fed our appetites. We fed them so completely that the world outside ceased to exist. Our minds may have been smaller than the cravings we felt to be anything to appease the voices in our heads telling us we are meant to be lonely.