Our Love

If love is the sum of two people exchanging lustful glances from across the room, we were infatuated.
We snuck our gaze up and down each other, eyeballing the most attractive parts.
We loved the kind of love they would write about in a novel, the kind of love that makes people stop and stare.
And that was the problem.
The world has a dichotomy: straight men and the others.
And so the problem with our gazes was that they weren't regular gazes, they were gay gazes.
It was the kind of gaze that let people know you were different.
It was the extra second you spend fixated on him that makes the world seem to melt away.
And I tell myself that we can't be together, that people would stop and stare, that we would be laughed at, ridiculed.
And he tells me that people are jealous of what they can't have.
And they resort to mocking them, a sort of self-dense mechanism.
The kind of psychological sickness that oozes hate from every crevice of their body.
He tells me every time they open their mouth, projectile hate-filled vomit clings to the most pure thing around.
And that our love is pure, our infatuation a continual state of child-like wonder.
I look into his eyes and see the sparkle of what could have been.
We could hold hands and walk down the street, our purity a shield against the demons that surround us.
We could kiss and our fervor would light the darkest of hearts.

And so I look at him from across the room, his hair falls in front of his electric blue eyes.
He lifts his hand to move the hair aside, and we make eye contact.
And in my mind, I imagine the things that could be, that could happen if I could get over my crippling fear of being ridiculed.
My mind aches with the thought of letting a fear of society dictate who someone loves.
His embrace would be something I never experience, and my entire being feels numb.
And he doesn't know what I'm thinking, and I'm never going to verbalize it to him.
So we have a standoff, eyes locked on each other, both trying to figure the other out.
And if love is the sum of two people exchanging lustful glances from across the room, we were infatuated.