Jazzled!

It's my life...

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Touched


No, I don’t care. Maybe this is what feels like to be drunk, as if the sun’s always out and making you dizzy, as if your head might float away at any moment. I keep seeing her face, freckled with honey spots, her lashes like the legs of amber spiders flicking gently around those weird eyes, her crazy hair that lights up red when the sun catches it a certain way. She smiles at me from the tops of the crippled trees that line the pavement on the way to college, out of buses that pass, her mouth all curves and fullness like the body I can’t get out of my head. I look at my fingers amazed, half-expecting to see them tipped with gold or glowing with that odd luminosity that shines from the sea sometimes. I touched her – we touched each other – why hasn’t something so incredible left a mark?

That’s before the cynic in me kicks in. That’s before I remember how good it was when Danny hugged me that time, when Andy held me. Maybe I’ve been so long without contact that touch is like food to a starving cat. But Ali’s different. I remember how I felt lying in Andy’s bed waiting for him. I’d made a decision and was going to stick to it, to get that experience out of the way and move on. The only thing I felt in the morning when I found nothing had happened was a sort of weariness that I’d have to prepare to cross that bridge again. I know now that it shouldn’t be like that. It should be exactly as it happened, knowing the rightness, the loveliness of it. Then I think but… But she’s a girl. And that’s not exactly normal, is it? But I guess I’ve never been exactly normal – Marz has told me as much, although what does she know about normal? So maybe I’ll stop thinking. But it’s scary, trusting your feelings to another person, especially one you don’t know well, and I’ve never done that before, unless you count Danny, and look what happened there. He told me straight out that it’d never happen, and it never did, only the hug when I was wearing the sari and the dark make-up and pretending to be his sister. That’s hardly normal.

And inside me there’s this constant flutter, this tug to see her again, this fear of seeing her. She didn’t turn up on the last day at college – I s’pose her dad’s still down, or maybe she went back with him for a while. It’s funny, but somehow we forgot to exchange mobile numbers when she left like that, so there’s no way I can talk to her, and I don’t really know how to contact any of the others to find out where she lives. Ali Ali Ali…