Two Minutes

• Posted by: Antonia Richardson
• Created: December 18, 2015
• 0

"You have two minutes before I'm drawing the line."
I said somewhere in between crushing kisses
and the taste of you thinking of her.

"Two minutes. And you are making me breakfast."
I whispered,
hoping I hadn't left a scar in your bed,
or messed too much with your head,
or that you'd want me instead.
Lazy poems and crude opinions and lost ambitions;
how can I hate her
when I see your eyes crinkle
and your crooked smile dimple
when just her name trips from your lips?

"Roll over."
He said,
his fingers brushing against my unloved skin,
crackling and raw behind the soft façade.
Drunken murmuring and sober wondering,
all the while thinking;
just how did we get here? 

"I'm not shy,"
I lie,
"Just cold."
And just a silly girl hidden in his cloud of old cigarettes,
who knows nothing
other than shattered promises and filthy sweet nothings.

I do not love him.
I do not even know him.
But he cannot love me.

I want to crack him open
take away his six string
and scatter him across the untidy garden
and touch him with more than words.

I want to feel the rough parts of his skin
feel the scratching, hot, breathless sting of the moment
with his ski jump hair
and lovely eyebrows.
Not worrying about her
and letting him touch me.

I want to talk to him
and listen
and listen
and listen 
to everything he says to me in his chess piece way.

I want to hook myself into his mind,
to unlock his thoughts,
freely and easily
and not because any drug has let him
but because he wants me.

I want him to just be someone I could fool myself into pretending to love.

"Okay, time is up, you are in the friendzone."
We laughed
and he didn't see the hurt in my eyes,
he didn't realise he made me like poetry that didn't rhyme,
he didn't know that I let my body freeze
and my lungs fill with smoke
because I’d rather be with him
than even colder small talk
with another boy in another dark room.

I want you to know that I am better than her.
I am better for you.
I was the one who saw you
burning in the corner of the room
hidden by the deafening shouts of the other, superficial men.
I want you to know that our story stopped too early
at an arbitrary moment in both of our lives,
after you poured out your heart to me and let me hold you.
I hope she is worth what we could have been;
we ended at the end of two minutes because of her.

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