Long Forgotten Bliss

He sways back and forth under the street lights and pulls on my hand, guiding me along. I can’t say I’m any more sober than he is; however, I’m not the one with the bottle in my hand. We’ve reached the bridge now and he looks down at me, his shoulders relaxed and a drunken smirk on his face. His blue eyes look me over again and again and for a minute I’m reminded of how deep they are. “The eyes are the window to the soul” they say, but Sasha redefines the saying every day. Every time I get a good look at them, in the right light, I’m thrust into everything I’ve ever known about him, and even the things I’ve never seen.
Back on the bridge we continue to utter slurred, blissful snippets of ourselves. I feel his warm lips graze my ear as he asks me how I could love a boy like him. I can smell the tobacco on his grey shirt, but that is only reminiscent of slow summer days spent watching dragonflies dart by, having much more business than us amongst the tall, dry grass.
I know what he means but I ask him anyway, stumbling through my question and falling into him, letting him wrap his slim arms around me. His awkward figure doesn’t provide much comfort but there, on the bridge, in the damp and sticky summer night, I close my eyes and entwine my fingers with his; his long, bony fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle. A guy like him, he says, a guy whose lungs are immersed in dirty addiction and whose winestained lips were the ones that grazed my neck. He’s always wanted someone to love him for real, he says. I giggle and look up at him, meeting his eyes again to be sure that what I’m about to say meets the very bottom of his soul. I tell him that sometimes, dreams come true. I cringe a little knowing I sound cliché, but it was what I’d wanted him to know for as long as he’d been lighting my cigarettes and filling my glass. I tell him that, past his messy hair, hollow cheeks and big, big eyes, I love him. I love him for his reckless mind, mouth and heart, what he is and what he isn’t.  
He kisses me gently, again and again, each raw kiss as novel as the first one. His empty hand traces my cheek bone, my neck, my breasts… and his hand lands on my hip. I tease the bottle out of his hand and rock it back and forth over the edge of the bridge, still pressed against what I was sure was the centre of the world. He warns me, stiffer now, not to be foolish. I laugh again and toss the bottle off of the bridge. There is no water underneath it, but we both hear the bottle drop into the fresh mud. For an instant, everything is static. My numb fingertips hang loosely where the bottle had been a few seconds ago. I tilt my head back guiltily - hoping, praying - for a kiss or a smile. But he was cold. He stares intensely at my empty hand. He had stopped grinning. I tell him he didn’t need it anymore and keep looking up at him hopefully; maybe he’d catch something in my eyes this time. He had told me not to be foolish, and, with that, he hastily drops his hands from my waist, and I watch him scramble clumsily under the bridge for the bottle.
I stare at the steep, muddy riverbank where I had just seen him. It was all that was illuminated by the street lights. It reminds me how much I still don’t know about him. How much I can, and cannot, see, even through his immense blue eyes. I could not see why he had begun using heroin, although I knew why he stopped; I could not see what he dreamt of becoming, though I could see he was a dreamer; and I couldn’t see why he had gone down to get the bottle, but at least he had come back up for me. Every question had an answer; it was a matter of looking for it.
With his return came a sudden rush of reality. We were no longer carefree lovers lost beyond the ever-present ticking of the sober minute hand. He towers over me, no longer breathing down my neck and I am forced to raise my eyes to his and shield my heart from any words I might let slip past my rib cage. He wouldn’t hit me, unlike the one back home anticipating my return. Though always sober, his rage was unpredictable. Sasha is different. As he looks down at me, straight through my eyes and to my very core; as he tells me to ‘Fuck off’ if it upsets me when he smokes or drinks; as he orders me to get out of his life if I am just like the others…I look right back into him. It was then that I felt time stop cold. Again. It was then that I realized my love for him was paramount to any of the feelings, thoughts, and words fighting to escape the tainted cell that one could call my rib cage.
And it is with the same force as my heart slamming itself against my bones that I crash into him and kiss his cold lips; kiss them again and again until his arms snake around me once more and pull me back into the centre of the universe.
This dreamlike high is what the world searches for daily; a sense of belonging somewhere, in someone’s arms, your soul raw beneath the white-collar lies, behind the blind eyes of humanity.  And there, half a world away from my own web of hollow promises, I hold on to the world’s long forgotten bliss of having found … myself.