When no one was looking, we built planes in the backs of classrooms. We built them poorly, and they rarely flew. We rarely tried to send them airborne. Mostly, we wrote on them—notes penned deep into the wings or penciled along the sharp belly at the bottom. Discovery required destruction—the quiet unfolding under a desk.
History class, we sat in the back right corner. We were both in love with Jonah. The teacher gave us Post-it stars for good work. We stuck them to his back so softly he couldn’t feel it. Once, one of us tried to place a plane in the space between his collar and hair. A blank one, one that confessed nothing. But he turned at the touch of it and, well, what could we say?
We laughed and told him his shirt was full of stars.
When we did throw the planes, they did little nosedives to the ground. When we had no stars, we used blue Post-it squares. We did this too long, and Jonah started turning around even when we did nothing. He saved them up and put them on our desks or our textbooks or the shirts of other people. He made it a game that we were all a part of, but the game was not about love.
I cannot speak for us both anymore, but I think, reading back, that most of our longing was cut with a fear that we wouldn’t be. Loved, that is. Or that we wouldn’t be loved in the way we’d heard about. We knew the love of our parents and families; we knew friendship—our own and quite a few others. We knew the way people talked about God and the way we tried to feel when we prayed. But we wanted another kind of love. We wanted to feel singular.
We knew the shape from all the TV shows and movies we stayed up too late watching at sleepovers. We watched every sitcom where love was all delay and waiting for the inevitable season. We went to 500 Days of Summer that summer and misunderstood Tom; we misunderstood The Graduate, a movie too old for us to care about seeing ourselves. We went to movies in the park and didn’t watch the movies at all, all of them black-and-white films on distant screens. We sat on picnic blankets and waited for the sun to go down and waited to see if anyone would shift closer to us in the dark.
We knew it from the way we felt inside, wanting this.
We wrote our wants onto the paper and turned the paper into other forms. Fortune tellers and boats and cranes. We told contradictory futures. We flattened boats inside books. We played with the wings of the birds and then opened them up again.