Love Handles

I think I wrote this sometime this year. Or was it last year? Well basically, I have nothing else to publish. haha. Whatever.



noit a nigami.


Love Handles


The sand scratched our feet as we knelt down to sit in the sand and wrap a towel around us. It was the Structure towel that I had gotten for free back in middle school after signing up for the Structure Membership card. It seemed like ages ago when all I wore was clothes from Structure; and indeed it was, Structure had long since been renamed Express Men. Back then, I probably would have never seen myself here. Back then, all I wore were khakis and white shirts. Back then, I had always thought that I would marry a girl at least four years my senior, because “girls my age were too immature.” Back then, all she was, was another little middle school teeny-bopper who knew the favorite colors of all the Backstreet Boys, but not that girls were allowed to wear colors other than florescent pink.

But there I was. Sitting on that beach—the one they always show in movies. Only this beach was littered with crushed beer cans and the sand was not so much sand as it was crushed rocks. But we sat down anyway, the cracked seashells poking at the soles of our feet, legs, butt and all. Otherwise, it was that beach. The only other people we could see was a group of small boys down the shore kicking a soccer ball aimlessly, guarded on either side by empty lifeguard stands that stood watch over a barren sea. And here we were with a Structure towel big enough to cover everything but our feet—the sun sinking into the horizon with the night chill fast on its heels. She shivered. I wrapped my arms just a little tighter around her.

We stayed that way until I could no longer bear whatever it was that was poking me in the butt. The towel fell from around us, and the warmth that we had collected escaped into the twilight.

“Stop fidgeting, Fattie,” she smiles, brushing away the veil of hair that hides her from me, tucking it neatly behind her ear.
“Look who’s talking,” I tease, pinching her love handles. The ones she had so fervently tried to lose this past summer. The ones that obliged her drag me out of bed at 5 in the morning because she refused to run around the neighborhood alone. The ones that compelled her to do fifteen crunches every night before going to bed as if it was the most effectual of exercises, “slow and steady,” she insisted.

After a feeble attempt to squirm away, I catch her in my towel and wrap my arms around her once more. I smell the ocean in her hair, and as the sun finally melts into the ocean, I rest my lips on the nape of her neck, then whisper, “Don’t ever lose those love handles.”