In the perspective of Samson
After a few days of being with Lucia, I have finally realized the difference between “like-liking” someone and loving them. When you have a crush on someone, you want to see yourself with them, kissing them or dating them. When you are in love, you just see that person. You see them in an all new perspective. When you have a crush, you see their beauty and that’s it, but love makes you see all of their flaws, and still see them as them. They’re still that person you smile at the name of and the person you want to be around you all the time.
I am in love with Lucia Hills.
To quote Poe, who is amongst Lucia’s “People Who Are Better Writers Than Me” list, “we loved with a love that was more than love.” I think that says a lot about us. We’ve loved each other for a while, but now we are loving together, out loud and in person and not while dreaming.
Lucia writes when she’s alone but isn’t lonely and is very lovely. She never let’s me see what she writes, usually. She was spending time with Cass today. I like when she does. It clears her head when I can’t and Cass is the sister Luc has always needed. Cass told me that she hasn’t read anything belonging to Lucia’s mind either.
Yesterday, she left me a poem at my doorsteps. I felt important for once when I read what she wrote with her small fragile hands onto the cloudy sky paper and folded unevenly like she does.
His eyes were like comets
not because of their light
or the idea
that they would eventually fall
it was their ability
to capture the attention of anyone
who was looking to get lost
in the sky
I was a girl with my head
in the clouds
although
I was not very tall
that was where my heart rested
where blues and greys were all you could see
and that was where i found
a pair of comets
looking down at me.
I stared at the inky writing for a while before I sent her a text asking when she wrote it. She told me in the most beautiful way. She told me she had written it a million times in her mind that she finally decided to stick it on the cage of the blue lines on the page to lock it up for me to keep.
That makes me want to write a million poems, but I realize that I already have. I understand completely what she’s saying and I think she’s saying what love is, what it really is. Love is thinking in poetry about someone. Courage is putting it to page and leaving it at their feet.
I was proud to be Lucia’s comets. I was happy to be her sun, the thing my parents named me after. I decided to write her back, because I wanted to show her I was willing to be courageous.
I wrote to her:
She had galaxies for eyes-- a system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction.
A day later, she leaves this in my locker during school:
He has the ability to type “define galaxy” into Google and it’s very attractive to me.
I keep the notes in a safe place, because that’s what people do when things are really important.
She is a galaxy, in a way, regardless of the joke. She was not one light, like her name limited her to be; she is infinite lights and treasures, together with flaws and bad memories, held together by the brain hidden beneath her skin and bones.
She is so much more than people expect her to be, like a phenomenal book you read for the first time. You flip pages, only to reveal more beauty within the text.
In eighth grade, she wrote “2.4645033852” on her hand in blue ink everyday. When people noticed her, which rarely happened seeing as she was the girl at the back of the class who never doodled or worked ahead and instead wrote, she just said “the great land is greater than its allies.” I don’t know what it means, but I don’t need to. If she needed to tell me, she would and since she hasn’t, I know she doesn’t have the words knocking at her teeth until they are allowed to escape. She still does it, and no one but Cass knows. Cass won’t tell me either. It’s fine.
It’s also fine that I am ridiculously curious.
It’s normal.
“I am perplexed by how fantastic things have become since I kissed you,” Lucia says while we ride the blue line train to school, like always. All our friends besides Ferris, who gets on in a couple stops, sit around us, smiling at each other or staring out at the concrete walls caved around the quiet train that probably sounds much louder on the outside.
Pink stains her cheeks, and she looks down at her hand, held around mine with its blue ink with the same number on it that it has had for the past year or so. She looks at me, her eyes kind and sweet like the kiss she had given me approximately 43 hours ago. She knows I won’t ask.
“I know, right?” I grin at her, “You’re a pair of rosy glasses.”
“Oh, I’m much more influential,” her voice smirks along with her lips. If I wasn’t drawn to look right at her, I would have been able to hear her cleverness on her tongue. “I’m a rosy painting, hung up in your bedroom. You think about me a lot, and I mean a lot to you, but not many people see me. Not only do I make you see differently, I make you think differently altogether. But I never see myself unless I’m looking in your eyes, reflecting mine back at me.”
“That’s brilliant,” Cass says, apparently listening to the entire conversation, which I am perfectly fine with. “You should write about it.”
“Who says I haven’t?” Lucia’s smile lightens the train car, though one of the lights is busted.
“We’d all love to read what you write, Luc,” I say, “but it’s worth the wait. Much like us.” The way I say us brings a smile to not only her lips, but her eyes. She loves the idea of her and I being together like that-- almost as much as I love her.
“One day,” she says, making room on the seat for Ferris to squeeze in beside her.
“Howdy,” Ferris says, queuing and entirely different conversation. I like that me and Lucia being together didn’t change anything besides that we can now express our love without fear. We can laugh the same way with our friends and talk about the same stuff we always do.
She wraps one her curls around her index finger and sighs, “Good times are like rubber bands: they leave and return bringing joy and excitement, only to leave again, and after a while, even when they come back, they start becoming weaker and stretched out, only to stop coming at all.”
She looks at me now, “But I think love changes that. I think it makes it impossibly strong to the point that it doesn’t even leave. It stays around, keeping us happy. It makes rubber bands into steel.” She looks down nervously, “Sorry, just a thought.”
“It was a lovely thought,” I say to her.
“Agreed,” Ferris smiles.
“Ferris, tell us about the boy you adore so much that you text me in all caps about at 3 in the morning,” Lucia smiles, and Ferris does. Ferris is pansexual, as Lucia is, and for whatever reason it was perplexing to some of the other guys at school. He wasn’t very “feminine.” He was often mocked. Lucia completely ignored all of the mockery he received, courageous to people like myself, and became his best friend, allowing him to join our small circle of friends though he didn’t seem much like us.
Lucia is one of those people who does things for people that she would only dream that people would do for her, especially when she was growing up. She’s always been the trembling voice in a room swallowed in silence. She hates speaking up while she’s doing it, but afterwards, her nervous smile shows the fear melting away.
I’m still debating whether I want to be her or be with her, but I doubt I could manage dating someone like me. It’s probably worth the writing skills and taste in music.
