By Margaret Beck
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referenced/implied homophobia, religious issues, internalized homophobia
I cut bangs in the dim, cramped bathroom of my childhood home a week before New Year’s Eve and regretted it the second the hair hit the sink, but I thought they might give her a reason to touch me. And they did.
I told her that I hated them, and she grinned at me, reached out and ran her fingers through one errant lock of hair—said they suited my face.
Her hand lingered there for a minute, twirling my too-short hair around her index finger, her eyes squinting behind the frames of her plastic 2024 glasses. We’d bought them in bulk at the dollar store the day before, along with 2 bags worth of silver and gold balloons. Might as well go all out, she’d said solemnly, thrusting her phone in front of my face, her web browser open to an article about rising sea levels. Who knows how many more New Years we have left? Now, as our friends gathered in the living room blowing up the balloons, the glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose, and I reached out a hand to push them back up. Before I could make contact, a loud pop sound broke through the quiet in the kitchen, and we both jumped back, her hand dropping to her side and mine quickly following suit. Peals of laughter rang out from the living room, and she smiled at me, tugging me along to rejoin our friends and dropping my hand the second we entered the room. The moment was over, left behind in that empty kitchen.
I’m always chasing these moments with her, where it’s just the two of us or at least it feels that way. I fixate on the way she drapes her legs over mine on the couch or turns to look at me when I laugh at something to see what was funny. I’m tallying them up, like six moments with her that might be something but weren’t quite in one night demonstrate some sort of progress from when I first met her, and we had no moments.
The rest of the party blurs together the next day, lost sometime in the early hours of January 1st. I don’t remember my hand landing on her waist, but I remember feeling the curve of it under my fingers. I don’t remember how I managed to end up draped on the couch next to her with both my arms wrapped around her bent knee without blowing my cover- or maybe I did blow it, but I missed it completely because I was too wrapped up in the crinkle of her nose when she grinned at me and the warmth of her hip pressed against mine to notice anything else.
But I do remember tugging the cuff of her jeans and joking that her nails were so much longer than mine, prompting her to catch my index finger between two of hers to examine it. I hugged her knee to my chest and asked her if growing up Catholic made her feel like she needs to be forgiven, and she told me she’ll never come out to her parents.
She’s a dream that won’t ever happen for me, and I’ll put off waking up for as long as I can. I’ll be as close as she’ll let me, until she meets a guy with sturdy back muscles and a fear of God who’ll go to church with her parents on the weekends and hold her hand in the pew and she leaves me behind completely. I hope he’ll make her happy, and I hope I won’t ever have to see it.
But for now, I’m luxuriating in the moment just before the ball dropped, when she threw her arms around my shoulders from behind me and tucked her chin into the crook of my neck. When I could still feel her breath hot on my cheek and hear her laugh echoing in my ear. When the year was ending, and we hadn’t quite begun, but it felt like we were on the cusp of something, even if we’d never quite reach it. The crowd of people on the tv were counting down from ten, confetti fluttering to the ground as her hand settled on my collarbone, red nails matching my flushed skin, and we had all the time in the world.
Margaret Beck is a fourth year college student studying English and living in Boston. In her free time, she enjoys baking, reading, and telling people that she likes to rock climb despite almost never actually doing it. This is her first time being published.
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