taking up smuggling

you've made me mad. i told you to learn to love, but you've started learning… with someone else. what infuriates me is that i still want you.

i want to love you up and down, sponge you with my heart, soak you in my eyes. your lashes are like slices of butterfly wings, and your forehead wrinkles in concentration like a flag when it's covering a brainstorm. i love your downy-soft hair and the way that, in half a moment, you can go from being sincerely serious to genuine laughter that sounds like a river of wine bubbling backward up a slope.

but you're like a word caught on the tip of my pointy tongue--so close we're nearly touching, but you're infinitely far away. every time i reach out to you, you shift away anxiously. you'll let your leg press against mine under the table, but you never let our goofing around turn into more, the way you used to.

you never let it happen with me the way you're letting it happen with him, now.

when i'm fumbling words but managing to say the right thing at the right time, you and him are saying the wrong thing at the right time and when you two burst out laughing together, i'm left blinking. i'm smart and he just pretends to be, but he comes across more real than me. the only thing he has that i don't is beauty, handsomeness, whatever the heck it's called. that physical trait that makes you want to get into his pants and not mine. besides that, i'm better, and we both know that. you just settle for less because it's easier, and dammit, you two are like matching gloves and i'm a third wheel.

i tell myself i'm better than you, and that i should move on. then i see you again, and i relearn that simple beauty trumps all the cynical elegance in the universe.

call me a fool, but i want to become a smuggler. i want your heart to "fall off the back of a truck" and find its way into my hands. i want to sneak into that empty box you call your chest, stuff your love into my jacket and walk out with it, because that's what you did to me. you want the world to know that you're beautiful, and i want so badly to whisper into your ear, "we already know," but you won't let me near you because you're afraid of standing beside someone who doesn't have stunning looks like you. you're afraid that the world will retract its approval if you did that, but i want to give you my con artist's professional smuggler's opinion that if the customs officers tell you that your eyes are on the wrong side of the border when you look at me, that you can cross anyway because love's not illegal.

you've got lies written under your fingernails, and just as you're about to start believing the truths i tell you, you go and nibble those nails and sink that black, poisonous ink back into your bloodstream. that's when you apologize to the customs officers, tear your eyes away and look for someone easier to love over on your side of the border. but just as i think you've given me up, just as i think that you've decided he's enough to satisfy you, i catch you staring at me with longing.

if i really deserve you, then "i can't have you," really means "i can't have you yet," because one day you'll understand.