Just a little something I whipped up today when procrastinating during NaNoWriMo.

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Here’s what I want. I want it to snow. I never want it to snow, but now I do. I want it to snow on a Friday evening, and I want it to cloak my neighborhood in white, and the night sky and the streetlights turn everything orange and ethereal. And I want to stand on my porch, slightly tipsy and warm from wine, and I have my winter coat on over my pajamas and everything is so quiet that I feel like something can’t not happen.

I want your headlights to sweep down my street, and you to park in an accumulating snow bank. I want you to unfold yourself from the car and shuffle toward me, kicking up snow, slightly sheepish, hands deep in your pockets, teeth chattering but you can’t be that cold yet. Perhaps you’re nervous. I want you to be nervous. I want you to be brave too.

I want to take a walk. You’re coming with me. I want to walk in the middle of the road, sucking in gulps of cold air and heaving out heavy sighs for no reason other than it feels good. I want the snowflakes fat and falling with a lazy albeit increasing urgency. I want the sky black. I want the houses silent. I want everything hyper-real. I want to notice how otherworldly everything is, but I don’t want to notice me noticing it, because that’s when the magic is gone.

I don’t want any small talk, I don’t want either of us to try to make this moment in any way normal. I want us to embrace the intoxicating possibilities, this feeling that anything goes. Instead, I want the supernatural quality of the evening to lend us honesty. I want to be comfortable telling you all the crazy thoughts in my head. I want you to have crazy thoughts of your own. I want us to be more alike than we’d originally thought.

I want you to tell me that I mean something to you in a way that I may never comprehend, and I want you to say that it no longer makes any sense to continue pretending otherwise. I want you to tell me that you always think of me. I want you to want to be with me. I want you to want to be good for me, and then I want you to be.

I don’t think we should discuss all the ways we could fail; I would rather focus on all the ways we could be a success. I think we should be ambitious. I think that we should try, because I’ve been trying to pinpoint why this is so scary and now think that maybe it’s because there’s nothing to be scared of. I don’t think we’re used to that. I want us to get used to that, and I want us to start tonight.

I want you to take a deep breath and grab my hand, a clumsy gesture, using playful exasperation to mask genuine shyness. Even through the thin fabric of my dollar-store gloves, I want to feel the lightning in your touch jolt through me. This is both amazing and terrifying; there is no going back now. I want to shrug out of your grip so I can wriggle out of the glove, maybe make some bad “no glove, no love” puns before taking your hand again. I want your bare palm pressed flush against mine, skin to skin, fingers locked, heart lines, life lines, fate lines co-mingling.

Then I want us to stop walking and I want us to kiss. I don’t care who starts it, only that it happens. I want your lips unsure at first, tentative, exploratory, soft against mine. I want you to pull away slightly, gauging my response, and I give a whimper and tug on the front of your jacket, back toward me. I feel you smile against my mouth and we get braver, the kiss escalating, veering away from innocent. I cup your cold face, nip at your bottom lip, lick the corners of your mouth, and your tongue sweeps against mine, a groan sounding from your throat. I want that heady fog to cloud my mind; I want to not be able to see or feel anything past this moment.

My toes officially go numb and my pants are now soaking wet. I want us to trek back to the house with exaggerated brrs, half-racing, half because we need to be someplace warm and half because we feel more has yet to unfold there. I don’t want this moment to end, this teetering on the precipice of the unknown yet intuiting that no matter what happens, it will be unfathomably good.

I want to close the door behind us, and the darkness to close in all around us, and the heat hits our skin as we undress in the living room, seeing nothing but blackness, hearing nothing but our frost-inspired sighs and sniffles and our wet coats and pants puddling on the rug. I want to not be suddenly shy but I know I will be. I know I’ll scamper through the unlit house, half nude, pieces of stray ice stinging my bare feet as I nearly trip over the cat lurking in front of his food bowl. I don’t want to turn on any lights; I don’t want anything that could potentially break this spell. I want to reach my bedroom and tug on new pajamas, fresh and dry against my cold skin. For you, I want to grab a pair of mesh shorts—long forgotten by a long-forgotten lover—and scurry toward the living room only to halt halfway there, banging into you in the dark hallway. I don’t want to blush when my cheek bumps your chest but I know myself and I will as I hand you the shorts, my fingertips brushing yours, and I hear you pull the shorts on as you stand beside me.

And I don’t know under what guise it will happen but I know I want to flop on my bed with a sigh, asking what next. I want you to collapse beside me, the old mattress giving a shriek and the rickety headboard whacking off the wall from the sudden weight, and you say you don’t know, but you do, and I do, and what we actually don’t know is how to get there.

While we try to figure it out, I want to continue to build the bridge between us. I want the cat to leap on the bed and knead our bodies before settling between us, and we take turns giving him distracted strokes as we talk about what life was like for us before the other showed up. I want to hear about what you liked to do when you were a kid, what the most fun day of your life has been so far, the craziest dream you ever had, what your death-row meal would be, what the meanest thing someone ever said to you was so I could set to work refuting it. And I want you to ask these things of me; I want to rouse your endless curiosity, I want you always intrigued, to always find me worth re-discovering.

I want the conversation to turn to what we would expect from a lover in an ideal world. In saying so, I want us to get more and more inspired the more and more we share, thinking about how we can totally pull that off, we can totally make that happen, this will be easy. Tonight we love and hate all the same things, and this new loss of individuality is thrilling, even welcome.

I want us to lay there, slightly overwhelmed in acknowledging this could be pretty intense. This could be important. There’s really something here. And I want you to confirm this and you do, by rolling toward me in the dark—forcing the cat to springboard off the bed, into the dark—and covering your mouth with mine.

Then I want you to figure out what happens next, because I can’t do it by myself. I still want some happy surprises. If you get stuck, we can work out what follows together. After all, I want us to want the same thing, and what I want is us.

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–Lux Zakari