Sylvie Brave, Pt. 2
Fourth contact. Or when the light
comes back, though for a caught breath
I didn’t think it would, reeling there
in the sublimity, a word
that in AP English Lit I learned
also implies terror. My teacher said, Your dessert
isn’t sublime—you aren’t scared of your tiramisu.
But the time you feel how small you are
in a rowboat in the roiling, bucking ocean,
how you can see the beauty of the wave
even as it crests up to take you under—
the fear is what gives it power. The fear
that, now that the sun has gone away,
it won’t return. The fear of driving out alone
into the world until you feel it accept you,
wrap you up in its weirdness, its waterfalls,
a boy’s thumb across your face. Knox won’t
kiss me first. I know this somehow. Maybe
because he’s a gentleman, or maybe he remembers
too well the last time (cue nightmare lunch
with Mom); maybe he wants to linger
in the sweet terror of the moment before.
But me? I’m not scared. Or if I am
maybe I love it.
When I lean in, our plastic glasses
bump, and he plucks them off, laughing,
and then his lips are on mine, his hands
in my hair, and he’s saying my name
like it’s a secret he’s been too scared to tell me
until right now.