Special. Favourite. Only. Boy.

I wish I could write short stories. Or poems about love and loss. I wish I could sit down for fifteen minutes and create a drawing, or compose a little song, that I could then bring to the people I love. I’ve never been a smooth talker, and I leave a lot of awkward gaps in my relationships with other people. I would like to make things that could cross these gaps. My friends and family could pop these little pieces of juvenalia into their mouths like macarons, chew them up some. When the sugar starts to dissolve on their tongue, and the taste reveals itself to them, they could say something like “This is delicious”, or “Thank you for making this for me”. I’d even take “I like it, but it needs a softer texture, and I like mine to be on the lighter side.” I’d make my macarons round, a pristine outer shell, uncracked. I’ve only ever had one such macaroon in my life, and that was at a cafe in Budapest when I was sixteen. I haven’t found any that come close since.

 

I wish I could love people quickly, without effort. It took me five years to lay my hand on my friend’s arm while he made me laugh. Not because I didn’t want to, but because it was difficult to do it right. If I did it wrong, he would pull back and tighten at my touch. I think often about the people I didn’t love fast enough, as we were back then, pristine memories receding into the past, the stories fading into my own mythology. Were we ever that good? Is this love I feel for them now based on the real? Is it possible for a macaron to be so round, so uncracked? Or do they only look that way because I had them in Budapest? The sun was out. I was surrounded by people I love, none who I see anymore, and I was laughing, frosting on my palette, keeping my hands to myself.

 

I have never been a smooth talker. I cannot write short stories, because I have to cross not gaps, but ravines.