Hamartia

by Scarlett Drake

But him…well, he was my inevitability. He was when it started. When everything else ended. Everything I was before. He was the moon and the stars and everything in-between and all I wanted to do was worship at his feet. The band, my girlfriend, my dad, everything that I thought was important to me, just ceased to exist the moment I first saw him. I’m not proud of that. But it’s what it was. There was before him and after him, two sides, and I am two completely separate people on each.

He’d given me a look. A look that shifted something inside me in a way that all those separate parts that made up the whole changed imperceptibly. So that they didn’t fit back the way they were supposed to. Like I no longer fit inside myself. That’s how I’d come to describe it. That was the power of that shift. The power of him. I was like a stranger to my own fucking soul.

“I do not want to be your friend, Raphael. I do not want to watch sunrises and think of you. I do not want to close my eyes to go to sleep and see the image of your mouth when you smile. I do not want to spend a five-hour flight daydreaming about your eyes or the sound of your voice or the way you say my name. I do not want it. And yet… all of these things I have done just today.”

“I want you. I don’t know what this is but I haven’t been able to think in a straight line since I saw you and it’s driving me insane. I want…to touch you, breathe you in, kiss you, taste you, and I don’t know what any of it means. It’s…it’s like I’m fucking obsessed. I feel obsessed. Have you ever been obsessed with anything? Ever wanted something so much it makes every breath you have to take without it, pointless?”

“I might have sort of wrote you a song.” His eyes light up brighter than the Christmas tree as he settles himself back on the sofa and sips his own wine. “Oh, this will be very good. Please tell me you will sing about my asshole.” I splutter out a laugh as I sit my glass back down. “That’s actually the title.”