[TILT]

While you were piloting a two-beer buzz and entranced in your turn at the pinball machine, I took the liberty of gazing uninterrupted at your profile, my stomach gently bubbling with narcotized butterflies. I drank it all in, everything that was already burned into my brain. Your perfect and precise jawline, tiny nose, and freckles that were barely visible in the dim and noisy lights of the machine. 

If the world froze now, and said freeze lasted forever, none of us dying or moving, and somehow fine with it, never aging or breaking down, just stuck where we were…I knew that I wouldn’t mind at all, because then I’d never have to say goodbye to you, never have to look away, never have to refer to the admittedly perfect image of you in my mind that I have to content myself with for the majority of my days and nights.

“FUCK! It just goes right down the middle! What the hell am I supposed to do with that?!” You playfully shook your tiny fist at the machine and scowled a childlike scowl that was just another brick in the wall of me loving you.

You looked over at me and I held your gaze for an extra beat, smiling, trapped in your eyes. You smirked that little smirk of yours and every atom in my brain went off like a car bomb.

“Good game, kid”, I said as I stepped to the machine, brushing against your body, partly out of necessity, partly out of need. The night ended, as it always does, and I went home with your smell on my clothes, your face in my mind, and a sense of love so heavy that it may very well crack the goddamned Earth in two.