Just For You

Have you ever experienced that feeling when somebody just walks into your life and makes it a better place? I have. And I know I’m lucky. I write right now for one of the best people I have ever known. My best friend. A person who, despite the storms raging inside of him, spreads joy wherever he goes.

A half smile, the constant fiddling with the ears, that distant look while trying to solve a problem, the coy unassuming charm. Maybe that’s what really did it. And before I realized it, I was shovelled out of the confused mess of thoughts and situations I was neck-deep in. The world sort of changed, my whole outlook changed. My next burst of laughter was only ever as far from me as your next gimmick.

Things sorted themselves out, knots came undone, and life just became what it really was supposed to be in the first place: simple, uncomplicated and beautiful.
Your hands, the long fingers, the nails that I always thought looked better than mine, the way they caress the electric blue of your guitar, the music that it all made together, filling the air with a sort of melancholy that sounded different from anything else strummed along the same lines.

The littlest stuff, that pause in the flow of things, when I knew you were cooking up your next joke in your head, the furrow on your brow when the punch line wouldn’t fit, and the way it was ultimately unleashed, sending me into peals of laughter, half because it was funny, the rest because I secretly anticipated it.

Then those times when doubt clouded your face, and your aura greyed, the way you pushed it aside to not let it affect you, and a smile would break on your face, like the first ray of sunshine.

The way I would see your waiting arms, half turn around to check no one was looking, and run into them at the first instance. The way, when you knew I felt slighted, you half squeezed my hand to let me know it was okay, and you were there, and I had nothing to worry about. The way I sometimes caught you looking at me, while I was busy doing other things, and the goofy grin that spread across your face on getting caught.

That first time, when your eyes begged me to stay, and I dropped my bags in the middle of the field, and you missed your bus back home. We struggled to fill the air with the volumes that were left unspoken, the others around us waited too, getting more anxious by the moment about getting back, missing all the excitement that flowed between us.

How could they understand, how WOULD they understand? They didn’t and they still don’t.

My best kept secret is also my worst kept secret:

I have known magic.
People think it doesn’t exist.

How little they know.