• "LOOK, FOOL— I LOVE YOU."

    —the little girl screams (and shouts and sobs), but she's not a little girl anymore, if she's old enough to love you like this. Love you with her clear, fierce gaze and fists balled at her sides while you're backed against a wall six lonely feet away. Love you with angry tears rolling down her cheeks like molten everything she's ever wanted which is you, you, oh god, you.

    Pan to the sidelines, where her two friends watch and bicker and mock like, "this is love?"

    If this is love, then (the two onlookers don't want to be in love, their hands are deliberately not clasped together, their shoulders brushing only because this is now and this is affectionlust but never anything as filthy as love) then things just got a hell of a lot more complicated.

    Pan back to our fiery little ball of teary-eyed hoarse-throat honesty (she just feels so much) and watch her take a step forward, she's shaking now, until the two of you are nose-to-nose-to-eye-to-eye, and BOOM everything explodes, reforms, and implodes with a big sucking sound until you're all one big wreck of emotional matter drifting through space like you've had all the time in the world and now you're off to see if the moon really is made of cheese.

    Too bad you're allergic to dairy.