Metis is everywhere. He's in the halls, in the cafeteria; he's in my head my bed the mirror over the sink in the bathroom when I'm brushing my teeth.

My sweet obsession.

I hear him in the songs I listen to at night, headphones thick and shielding my ears from the twins shrieking next door. Every word is describing him, the longing I feel for him, the agony I have not knowing how to deal with him. The chords ripple through my stomach, the riffs play along my ribs and make my heart stutter in my chest.

I see him in the kids on the playground when I'm picking up my sisters. That dark haired kid happily burying a toy truck in the gravel, and watching with ill concealed malice as the popular/bully of the swing set society whines and tosses about for his missing model. That is so him.

I hear his voice in language lab, whispering in French, Je suis le vôtre. He is muttering in guttural German, nehmen Sie mich zu Ihrem Zimmer zurück. And oh God the Spanish murmur of Tóqueme, Tóqueme, Tóqueme por favor… well no fucking wonder I failed that test. How the hell am I supposed to focus on verb placement and pronoun use, when the sound of his voice is filling my ears?

It's not in the way his hand brushes mine in the hallway; it's not the half embarrassed way he jostles next to me shoulder to shoulder, an excuse to touch. It's not the late nights chatting on aim or even the mixed cd he shoves blushing into my hands a month into dating.

It's in the hours, the infinity of space between us when we're not together. It's not that I don't like the time we spend side-by-side, cause really that's pretty much awesome incarnate. It's just when I'm alone. When I'm closing my eyes, my fingers hovering in the air over my face, combing through invisible black hair, course and wavy. It's in the burning eyes I've imprinted into the backs of my eyelids, it's in the torture of trying to remember the exact pitch of his voice when I took him by surprise and made him cough a mouthful of banana pudding into Charles' aquarium. It's in remembering every single moment I've spent with his warmth in my vicinity, it's in the early hours of dawn when I envision the next weekend we can stay up until 5am playing super smash brothers brawl and getting sugar highs on pixie stixs and mountain dew.

It's those times I know it's love.