the chain from off the door

your red christmas sweater

i don’t know that much about you yet. you have always been tall enough to snare my flighty attention and consistent enough in goodness to keep me looking for more, but what else? i don’t know that much about you, not yet. what i do know of you is intwined with what i know of myself when i am around you. and what we are is made up of small things. a corner of someone else’s kitchen, a slice of florescent light, you and i are both buzzed. half a conversation beneath the watchful hum of a house party before i am whisked away into the dark of october by someone else. and then reintroductions. i didn’t remember your name. a pink button down shirt and your explanation for it. frozen yogurt in the cold. we are all tied up in your basketball jersey. the first snowflakes dancing into my mouth and getting caught in my hair. i think about you and i think of that red christmas sweater that you wore on the night we really became something. a grin split my shadowed face as i snatched it from you like a joke and watched you follow me like a tall shadow around the almost-empty dance floor. we were quivering on the edge of something that night. no one else knew it. but i prayed that it was so, my hair long down my back as i rapped along to a mac miller song and your eyebrows searched for the middle of your forehead, you were that surprised. “you’re actually a badass,” you told me, and the corners of my mouth searched for the edges of my small face as the music thumped out another addiction. what we are is made up of small things, and i am just small. your red christmas sweater hung to the tops of my knees that night and when i took you to me in the dark of an almost-empty dance floor, my little hands brushed your hips and ribs. you smiled down at me while the blue shadows kissed your face like i could have. two weeks later i did, and i’m still grinning about it. i don’t know that much about you, not yet, but i know enough to know that i’m not going to change my mind, not without a fight.