I loved a boy’s arms once. For a week, for a day, for an hour, or maybe forever. At five in the morning, driving through an empty road flanked by clapboard houses and towering green mountains. Driving in a line of cars, each filled with a group of hopeful and passionate and angry people, some fifteen, some twenty-four, most somewhere in between. I was somewhere in between. He was somewhere in between. Arriving at the house, rolling out our sleeping bags, trying to sleep, failing. Hearing the shallow breaths of forty people pretending to sleep while really picturing the naked bodies of the other thirty-nine. We are counselors at a camp that belongs to a fringe youth movement. We are changing the world, we tell ourselves and anyone who will listen. We are really just walking and eating and teaching small children to be intentional about their relationships and share their candy. And today we are running away and into infinite mountains.
Slowly, some of us wake from our pretend sleep. We sit quietly by the pile of bodies, reminiscent of a heap of corpses. We read the New Yorker and laugh whispered laughs at their witty jokes. Ha-ha! We are so learned, so intellectual, so smart and knowing at seventeen. We read about people’s heads being blown off in Libya and about the stagnant senate and we laugh whispered laughs. Ha-ha! We are changing the world while some forty-year old man is sitting in an air-conditioned office and typing fancy words to describe the most basic horrors known to man.
More bodies rise. We cook eggs and bite into whole raw peppers and lie out in the slowly burning sun. It is nine in the morning and we gulp down beer and hard cider and sneak into the woods to smoke blunts and joints and cool air.
Three of us sit on the side and tuck our legs under each other like we’re knitting a quilt. We pass a bowl around and inhale, inhale, inhale. Now lift your finger, we chuckle at each other. Now pass, please! Soon our arms are woven together too and we are falling and smiling so hard it hurts. A girl pulls out her IPhone and snaps a picture- this one’s going up! We smile harder. Don’t forget to tag me! And I see him in my hazy peripheral vision, leaning over the skillet and charming the poor girl next to him. Poor girl because for today, for now, for maybe just this minute, I know he’s thinking of me.
I see his arms, his legs, and his half-moon smile. I walk up the hill and behind him, pressing my hands onto his back. He doesn’t turn to look at me, instead wrapping a pair of long arms around my torso. We pull away from it all, five feet to the left, ten feet backwards. We lay down on someone else’s sleeping bag—I’m sorry! —and my head rests on those arms that I loved. The words he spoke and the words I spoke back were jumbled and hard, careening out of our mouths and jamming themselves into the nooks and crannies of each other’s brains. This is special, we tell ourselves. This is summer special, always special. Just-this-second special. Every shade of green and brown and yellow and blue is magnified a thousand times over and doused in a layer of shellac. Tree branches wave manically and my skin is baking off and the world’s course is too much for me to watch. I close my eyes and am filled with glee in a way that I haven’t been since I was a braided seven-year old girl.

I saw shapes and colors on the backs of my closed eyelids once. I was seven and my father was driving us to school. We were a dirty Subaru in a sea of other mid-sized city cars plastered with anti-fracking and “end the Israeli occupation!” stickers. The sunlight was blinding and I had forgotten my plastic heart-shaped sunglasses on my bedside table. I closed my eyes and out of nowhere, out of left field, hot pink! Yellow! Orange! Green, blue, periwinkle! Zigzags, rings of varied sizes, stars and fireworks, all moving in and out of the black screen that was my brain. I frantically opened my eyes, terrified that some other-earthly creature had abducted my mind and body. Of course, I was still sitting on the scratchy gray car seat, my baby sister sleeping with her lips parted open and her head back as if her neck bone had snapped in two. But the colored silhouettes remained right in front of me; inescapable no matter what way I moved my head. I frantically tapped the back of my father’s seat, demanding an explanation for this bizarre phenomenon. He smiled a knowing smile in the small mirror hanging above his head and told me not to worry; it was just a natural illusion that your eyes create. And then I learned that I wasn’t unique, that every person who closes his or her eyes in front of a bright light experiences the odd and exciting alternate world that I had just explored. And so I got to school and forgot about that world, treating the shapes like fruit flies, an unavoidable inconvenience meant to be ignored.

Now I saw shapes and colors on the backs of my closed eyelids again. Really saw them. The patterns were changing at an unfathomable pace, screaming hues flashing as if a quickly clicking projector rested in my head. My hair was splayed over his broad bicep and my cheek grazed his beard. It was rough but soft at the same time; sometimes, as we were falling asleep at four in the morning, I ran my hand up and down his face just to ink the feeling into my memory. Right then, my legs started to tingle and I knew it was necessary, absolutely necessary, that he be inside my brain. It was a chemical need, a physical urge- how could our heads be touching but thinking different things?

So I told him everything with an urgency typically reserved for medical emergencies and soul-baring secrets. I told of pale pink circles that grew and grew until they burst and of yellow light that hacked through black emptiness. I told of blue that filled the whole space, only to be quickly replaced by orange and red squares. And then I felt a heavy hand press into my own and I knew I could be here for the rest of whatever time was and not say another word. A gurgled giggle slipped out of me and then I couldn’t stop, hiccupping and yelping as if I was alone. Well, we shared a brain now! I was alone. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a symphony. My high-pitched screeches were joined by his instrument, a genuine stomach laugh, deep but hushed. My ears drowned out the babbled prate coming from one, two, seven feet away and only heard this. This and the birds singing and the wind rustling soft July leaves against peeling branches. I thought to myself, “I hope he doesn’t get up for the rest of the day”. I wanted to think, “I hope he never gets up”
but in the deepest recesses of my psyche I knew that we had no chance of being forever. No, I would settle for just today. Water built up in my tear ducts and I didn’t know why. A day later, a week later, years later, I would know it was because I loved a boy’s arms for the first time. But in that second, I silently cried for no reason at all. Slices of sunlight slashed open my skin and revealed my insides and I was cut loose