What I Wish I Could Tell Them When They Ask If He’s My Boyfriend
He's a map that always leads in the same direction, no matter how many routes I take the only place I end up is home.
By 
Lauren Hurst
I’m desperately trying to shake the dejavu of this moment but the memory tastes far too familiar to deny. Your silhouette plops down at my feet as you balance on the tip of my bed to tie your laces. Nobody really knows you’re here, and if they did they wouldn’t nearly understand our situation.
I despise trying to fit the entirety of us into such an insignificant word, but what the hell else do you call two people who just can’t seem to quit each other? See were not like them, we don’t slip into a pretty little relationship label that can be picked from a drop down bar on Facebook. Still, I never really knew how to answer the question “Is he your boyfriend?”
No, he’s not.
He’s just the guy who knows every crevasse of my body like it’s been the national anthem of his Sunday mornings for the past 4 years.
He can see through my barriers like stretched canvas in the sunlight and walk through my walls like the ghost of lovers past.
He’s not my boyfriend but he’s spent months building safe pillow forts in my head while perfecting pillow talk on my bed.
He’s not my boyfriend but he calls me baby and beautiful and at three am when he’s liqoured and lonely.
He’s not my boyfriend but I promise you I know more about him than you ever will, I know the story of the scar on his left knuckle and I’m the author of the one on his origami heart.
He’s not my boyfriend but when my mind slips past the midnight security guard he’s the first place it wanders to, and the last place they think to check.
His fingers are rivers and valleys that I never want to stop exploring and his palms hold life line creases that only match mine through rose-tinted glasses.
He’s not my boyfriend, he’s a map that always leads in the same direction, no matter how many routes I take the only place I end up is home. He’s my book of dirty secrets and my fixer of all things broken.
He’s not my boyfriend but sometimes by moonlight he whispers that he loves me, and I know if words were weapons those three would pierce like poison darts. They’d rip skin in premeditated places that don’t quite hurt enough to kill, invading my veins until I’m filtered into one part hopeless and two parts his. Not his girlfriend, just his.
He’s not my boyfriend, but if you dusted for fingerprints you’d find mine dancing on every inch of him.
His closets always empty because he’s not afraid to wear his skeletons, and regardless every time were together we end up tangled like dirty laundry.
Truth is most nights I don’t know where he ends and I begin, like his soul is soldered onto mine.
I tried to break it off in search of something I could call my own, but each night my bones rattled with growing pains, not of growing up, but of growing apart.
And Slim warned me about what happened when a tornado meets a volcano but I’d be Pompeii 8 days of the week of it meant you’d choose from to pour your deepest parts around me for eternity.
Honestly I don’t even know if we are Nicholas Sparks’ next love story or Shakespeare’s next tragedy. I don’t know if I’m a by-product of the 21st century’s biggest misconceptions and I don’t know whether I care.
See our demons, they have play dates,
And our insecurities catch up over coffee.
He is the hall of mirrors to my house of horrors and it seems like around all his dark corners there’s pieces of myself staring back.
This is dysfunctional and dangerous yet I’ve never felt so excruciatingly electrified, so let them roll their judging eyes.
No, we’re not in a relationship, but darling whatever we are in feels much, much bigger. 
