Fleeting Affection

Twilight sprawled out wide, a deep rushing blue dotted with newly glowing streetlights and warm cricket buzz rising up into the sky. Rachael loved this time of day, especially on a quiet evening, devoid of traffic, devoid of kids on bikes. She loved the stillness, the way that the dimming light made everything softer and prettier… she loved the tranquility of it, and the sheer static magic of freezing the world between light and dark, between day and night, between sun and moon, and creating a sort of hidden alley free of the constraints of time. She imagined the world, every evening, just stopping for a brief and beautiful moment to catch its breath before trudging dutifully forward. In these hidden moments, and these moments alone, Rachael was in love.

The object of her fleet affection was a nameless face across the street. A new boy, her age, lived there. He was tall, too skinny, and he mostly kept to himself. He didn’t, most times, seem very interesting at all. But like electric lamps and headlights and fireflies, he took on an entirely new dimension in the gathering darkness. Before the black could obscure him completely, he would become someone else, someone different than anyone that Rachael had ever seen. She couldn’t articulate the change, exactly, and certainly didn’t need to. Nobody knew about her secret love. Rachael barely understood it. But it happened every night that summer. As the sun set and the moon rose and the world paused to catch its breath, Rachael would meet him in the street between their houses.

Lit up by the pale glow of the suburban streetlamps, Rachael would take his hands and he would take hers and they would engage in a chaste and electric kiss, the kind that causes teenage girls to raise one leg slightly behind them in a show of romantic abandon. And in those moments, Rachael and her fleeting love would exchange words, barely sentences, that displayed a sort of eerie synchronicity. When the moment had ended, he would return to his world and she would return to hers and there wouldn’t be a thought between them of the other. But for the minutes beneath the streetlight, they were the only thing that mattered to each other. Neither questioned it and neither delved into it. They just accepted it and allowed themselves, in the moment, to be wildly in love with the other.