you loved him the way strange things love—without language, without rules, without needing to ask why.

you weren't quite right. your shirts were all secondhand and your heart was all first-come, first-served. you had more notebooks than thoughts, and most of them were filled with sketches of monsters that looked suspiciously like you. your room looked more like a thrift store than a place of rest, but you wouldnt have it any other way.

tendou was a boy made of wire and wonder, gangly and loud and beautifully impossible to ignore. he was the punchline no one got and the joke no one forgot. and when he smiled at you across the lunchroom that first day, it felt like the universe letting out a sigh of relief.

people said you’d grow out of it. the weirdness. the noise. the love. but they were wrong. it only grew louder. more vivid. more holy.

you met at the edge of seventeen, when everything felt too big to carry alone and too fragile to hand off. he was taller than you expected, and kinder, in the quiet sort of way that doesn't announce itself. he laughed like it didn’t matter who was listening. he looked at you like it did.

the first time he kissed you, you were both wearing halloween costumes in april. he was a vampire. you were a cowboy. neither of you explained. neither of you needed to.

you make a list of things you want to do before you die—number three is “start a cult for pigeons.” number eleven is “kiss each other in every public park.” number seventeen is just “be weird forever.”

neither of you know where this is going, and you don’t need to. loving him feels like finding a language you never knew you were fluent in. like you’d been waiting to speak it your whole life.

sometimes, you lie side by side in the grass, naming the bugs that crawl across your arms. he names one after you. it’s the prettiest beetle you’ve ever seen.

and you think—if this is what love looks like, you’re glad it doesn’t look like anything else.