He came careening into my shoulder on his longboard. I only saw him a brief second out of the corner of my eyes before he crashed into me, framed in my thick, dark eyelashes. His arms wound around me in tangles and his hands held onto me as we both flew backwards.

I gasped, pulled back with his movement, the very gravity of him, as I sunk into him and gripped his arms to keep from falling. My big feet stumbled across the flooring and I feared the fall. But he didn’t let me slip through to the brittle pavement, I was flying and he was warm against the autumn air and setting sun.

The embrace lasted only a second, but my smile held fast.

He never did what I expected. He was chaotic as I was messy.

I hardly knew the boy and with my cryptic ways, there was no possible route for him to get to me. But there was a certain beauty to mystique; a lightning shock to the touch of feeling out one another’s boundaries.