Only You

what is love

It's well after one in the morning when I arrive home. The house is the same temperature as it is outside. It's a shell of shadows and stale air. The house is empty. Again. 

I turn on all the lights, even the ones upstairs. I hate being home alone in this awful big house. There are too many shadows, unknown drapes of darkness in the corners and around every wall. Back in New York City we lived in a smaller apartment. It wasn't even half the size of this house. 

I find the note on the kitchen table. Went to city. Food in the fridge. -Mom & Dad

I don't even know why they bother with the notes. As if I couldn't figure out for myself that they would rather spend days in a crappy hotel to be near their daughter in jail than live in this house with me. I crumple it up and throw it away. There's no telling when they'll be back. I know they wish every day it was me behind those bars instead of Arden. I wish it too, sometimes, when the night is dark and heavy and crawls through my eyes. 

But tonight I don't feel so bitter, because Cate kissed me. She kissed me in a moonlit clearing in the woods and the snow melted as it fell on our skin. I stare at my raw red hands, and smile because I know hers are the same way right now. I could fly out the door and run the length of the town back into her arms. I could run forever if I had to. 

I love her. The words crash into me, crash into each other, the way clouds collide at sunset. I love her, I love her. I know I've loved her before we'd even met. I know I've loved her and looked for her in everything beautiful and perfect that existed. And with this realization comes a feeling of sheer delicious terror, because I know what could happen if we became reckless, but it's only a ghost that lingers in the farthest corner of my mind. 

My mind flicks through the moments like an old film reel, each frame carefully drawn in immaculate detail. Driving her home, seeing her stand on the porch and watch me drive away. Her leaning against the counter at the store, asking me to say something. The cigarette between her red lips. Her walking slowly across the classroom, talking about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Her in the library, calling me beautiful. 

Her sitting next to me that night on the bus. Her eyes were rimmed with tears long shed. Her hands were shaking and she looked so lost.

"Cate," I whisper. 

The house hums her name. I could say it forever. 

I eat something, then go up to take a bath. I walk as if my feet are trapped in honey. In the shadows and corners of the house, where there used to be demons, there are now silver silhouettes of angels.

I sit in the bathtub, watching the steaming blue-green water rise around me. I trace my fingers over my bare skin, and closing my eyes, and sinking deeper into the water, I almost believe that it is Cate touching me, her hands running over me like a mountain stream. I sink lower until my ears are half submerged by the bubbling water and the dull rumble becomes Cate's voice saying my name, over and over. Her voice falls like pearls into the golden cups of my ears.

When I was thirteen I fell for a girl named May. She was my first girl crush. I had written countless pieces of poetry declaring my passion. I had seen her and wished she would look at me the way I looked at her. But what I'd felt for her was nothing, I realize now, but an experiment. I had loved her as you would love a foreign beautiful object because it was new and different and exotic. What I feel for Cate I know is real. For Cate I would crawl through Hell. And I know that even if Cate had been distant, aloof, if she had pushed me away tonight instead of pulling me close, I would still have loved her as endlessly and achingly as I do.