charlie brown shoes

I was newly 14 and had kissed one other boy. He was 17 and to me, almost like a grown man. He had those heavy drowsy eyelids that partially obscured irises of watery blue-green. When he turned them to me, I felt faint. My best friend and I were convinced he had the same exact nose as Michelangelo’s David. Light seemed to attach itself along the two ridges of flesh created by that divot connecting his nose and upper lip. When I thought he was unaware, I would stare at his full rectangular shaped bottom lip like it was a beacon. He would catch me and I would avert my eyes for fear my heart would literally stop. He was on our pitifully bad football team and had a v-shaped torso which sat atop the prominent upper glutes and thick thighs typical of linemen. His shoulders seemed massive and rocklike. When he spoke to me, he made a show of bending down as if from a great distance (His 6’3” to my 5’4”); casting me in his shadow. Over and over, my mind replays the first time he pulled me beneath him into the cushions of my mother’s couch. He was at least 75 pounds heavier than my 115 pound frame. I was afraid, but there was no way I wanted him to stop. Warm dark water rises slowly and lifts me afloat; I close my eyes and am gently engulfed. I do not struggle in his wake. I am being carried away in a current so subtle it is barely perceptible. My mind approaches serenity, emptiness, but I am not asleep. I am sustained only by these sensations that originate in the core of each of my cells and I do not exist outside of this situation, outside the feeling of his skin, his smell, his mouth, my hand on the back of his neck, in his hair, the weight of him keeping me submerged. There is no concept of time here. An hour could be a minute, several could have passed or none at all. We would emerge, panicked and disoriented in the wee hours of the morning, untangle ourselves from each other and the throw blanket. He would run out while putting on his coat, pause to give me one last look or grin and be gone with a “whump!” of our front door and a blast of cold air and snow. Like debris, suddenly washed ashore, head and shoulders’ gentle collision first, clothing weighted, hung up on small rocks bulrush and driftwood, limbs heavy, only aware of the absence of his weight and heat. Cold air foreign without his dioxide, sound intrudes my ears.