To Eli

Sophia Quintana

It started, as these things often do, with looking. Stolen glances across the hallway

between classes, beneath the oaks out in the courtyard, hoping to catch your eye. I told myself it was nothing, that teenage hearts are prone to flights of fancy. But there was something there, wasn’t there, in the way you looked away smiling?

I came to know the map of your face like one knows home. Your mother’s features, your

father’s demeanor. The whiskers that appeared atop your cheeks when you laughed, those eyes rimmed in dark lashes that saw everything yet seemed to look right through me. Your hands, alive with motion–gesturing wildly as you spoke, palms up in question, fingers dancing to some song only you could hear. I watched and wanted in equal measure, scared to name what was growing within me like morning glory, reckless and blue.

The secrecy of you held a sweetness: our world bounded by the four walls of our little

classroom yet vast as the questions we asked each other in hidden moments. What did you dream of? Who did you want to be? I saw your soul unfolding like the pale wings of a moth emerging from its cocoon. You were becoming who you were, and I loved you for it with a fierceness that terrified me.

Because to love is to open yourself to loss. I should’ve said something then. Held your

gaze and let you see the depths I saw in you. But the chance slipped through my fingers like

sand, like water. I didn’t know how to want you openly, proudly, in a world so eager to judge.

So I stayed silent, and you stayed wondering. Wondering, perhaps, if you had seen true

what was there, if I felt for you even a hint of what burned within me every time our eyes met. Now, five uncompleted songs, forty-three journal pages, and seven failed love letters later, I try to convince myself that silence was not surrender–that loving you from afar held merits of its own. But true love calls us to courage. Beyond fear or doubts, it bids us to speak. So I stay silent, because this was inevitable, because trying to name what exists in the silence between us would only destroy the beauty of it.