Your girlfriend’s cherry Chapstick was stuck to your bottom lip.

I wish I could say that kissing you was one of those moments that make the world feel finitely infinite, but the thought takes me back to the summer you first waved at me from the other side of the water fountain. The summer it first occurred to me that something was happening – something was changing. My heart was going to burst from inflating so much. Eventually, inevitably, the bloated thing would reach the borders of my ribs and collapse from punctures that might have looked extraordinarily beautiful if you stepped back far enough and squinted your eyes.

I was resuscitated during those weeks, felt fires ignite with the small timbers you tentatively handed me from across a falsely lit room with a spurting geyser glittering silver and bronze.

And if you want to know the truth, I wish I could take it back. All of what I said to Joseph the day you kissed me on the bench outside the music classrooms. I texted him in the bathroom after you left, my shaky, sweaty fingers slipping over all the wrong letters and symbols that would never have captured the giddiness that burned through my body like fiery alcohol.

Baby, you made a mosaic out of me. I hold myself up with the jagged fragments of dumb romance and shattered promises, but who’s to say your girlfriend doesn’t either? You can always tell by Chapstick smears how hard someone’s been kissing you.