A Transference

Vic Nogay

After you left, I had sex with a boy in a stranger’s bedroom in Boston after a Springsteen concert and a Red Sox win, and that should have been the first time. He was nice and he put on a condom without me even asking. He was my height and was impressed by my high-top Converse. I can’t remember his name or the color of his eyes, but I remember he had a freckle below his mouth that folded into his dimple when he smiled. It melted me like your mouth, how you’d disarm me with one smirk.
  
          I met him already buzzed at a college party. After all those years of you, of holding back and hiding, I was eager for haste. So, I kissed a boy my age in public, up against a stone wall, bumping my head, biting his tongue. We nearly capsized the keg and got flayed by the whole room. And you know what he did? He grabbed my hand like it was precious, like he was worried I might cry, or run. We laughed our way up the stairs, away from the trailing heckles and boos.

          In a room, we shut the door but didn’t lock it. We didn’t talk about music or love or philosophy. We didn’t talk about me and we didn’t talk about him. I didn’t talk about you, and I was proud of that. I thought about you once when he hummed in my ear. It was disorienting, like a dream—I opened my eyes, sure that I was loving you.

          He looked me up online when I got back from where I’d been—“Just checking in,” he said. But I was already back in bed with your songs, burned acoustic tracks, .mp3s on my iPod, my parents’ stolen vodka and a coke, knowing I’d love everything that reminded me of you.

Vic Nogay is an emo poet with a B.A. in Creative Writing from Denison University. She has work forthcoming in Barren Magazine and work appearing currently in Lost Balloon, Capsule Stories, and others. She is a two-time Best Microfiction nominee. Twitter: @vicnogay Read: vicnogay.com

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