You do not turn the lights off immediately; you aren’t ready to sleep yet. You are not tired. So you stare. You stare at the tiny, almost invisible golden hairs on her left cheek. You look at her nose and trace the raised ridge it made on her face. You carefully inch your mouth closer to hers and try to breathe in the air she breathed out. You feel grateful that she’s already unconscious because she might think you’re a freak, but you know that she won’t. She smells faintly like cherry and mint. You stare some more and you kiss her hair while your heart overflows and you think “i cannot lose this.”
and then one day you do.