The first time I smelt the rum on your breath, tasted the smoke you had as you walked from the station, felt your mouth was warmer than mine. Learnt how to kiss you. The first time I asked you what you were thinking. The first time I felt your skin on mine, the first time our faces touched. The first time I made you laugh. You laughed and we were happy. For the first time, with each other. All in the same night.
Your eyes. The first time you knew me.
The first time we saw what the other looked like, what we felt like when our clothes were on the floor and we were on each other. The first time we were alone. The first time I saw you. The first time I heard you. All in the same night.
The next morning, for the first time, I heard you sleep. Wrapped up in your limbs, I listened to you breathe. Peace. I wondered if that first time would be the last time, laying cocooned in your frame, our fingers woven, our colours bleeding into each other. Even deep brown skin is stained with freckles.
The first time I set about fixing your hunger. A breakfast eaten well past midday. I watched you thinking about your past when we shared a toothbrush and your head rested above mine as you watched me in the tiny mirror above the sink. The first time I met you.
Your peace was the one from the day before yesterday. So finding it with me - in us - that first time, was a reminder of what you had lost. That first night we shared: I didn’t dream, and you held on.
On the second day, I let you go. I didn’t want to.
The first time you played with the lone curl laying beside my left ear. You pulled the dust out of my braids and I rubbed the sleep from around your eyes. Maybe that was the first time you remembered who you were with, the day before yesterday. In those twenty-four hours with you, that was the first time I thought about my last.
The hatred, the hard-wishing away of those first times. How those first times should have been the very last, only remembered now like they are with you. The first hello, the first goodbye, the first kiss, the first time we woke up wrapped up in each other from the night before, the first tears, the first make-up, the first time I didn’t trust the bastard anymore. The first time I stopped loving.
This is beautiful, Leila. Many of us can relate to this, no doubt.
Even deep brown skin is stained with freckles
Re read this a few times. Feel like it's a deeper meaning than I can unpick..... xxx