Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I am a girl who likes ruins, pausing most often to admire the corners of something only when it is crumbling to dust. In much the same way I am fond of you more for your cracks and wildly contradictory neuroses than for anything that comes to completion under your hands. I like best the grooves where everything has had a chance to settle, where the paint has been scratched away and I can see what used to be.

Perhaps I am sentimental and overly precious, writing encomiums to your kneecaps and dressing up in a striped shirt and Lone Ranger mask and making friends with every passing snail. Those are my own grooves, where I have somehow decided to settle.

But I like best on my hands the dust of what has been loved and hated and fought over and won, the smell of things lost and found. I'm better in the middle than I am in the beginning, better when your newer layers have worn away in places and your old wallpapers are there. What happens under your floorboards and the grooves of your fingerprints is much more interesting than what happens in your pockets.