loving (lying)
by Sophia Luo
A piece about what it means to love, or perhaps to lie instead.
i love you i type. i send it before i lose my courage. i wait. … appears on the screen. haha lol he sends first. what are you laughing at? i think to myself. me? i picture you leaned up against your bedframe face illuminated by the brightness of your screen brows furrowed, sighing at a naive girl’s innocence. you lower the brightness of your phone to see “i love you” in its full glory in black nondescript font. i wait to see if you will reciprocate my lie. i love you too he chooses to write, lying between his teeth. i smile at my screen anyway, laughing at the irony of it all. both of us say “i love you” as part of a game. we lie to enthrall and trap each other in webs. no one wants to be the first to lose, to surrender. you spin lies like a spider, weaving a web that’s ethereal at first sight, with dew clinging to the glowing strands. yet as i fly closer, my wings beating fast— a mirror to my beating heart, i see the corpses: mutilated, broken, ugly.
Process
I came up with this idea late at night when I was laying on my bed, looking up at my ceiling and thinking about what it’s like to be a teenager in love. This poem is not based on a true story, yet I tried to depict the feeling of lying to someone. I tried to imagine the two people in their separate beds on their phones and the emotions running through their heads. I was also thinking of a possible metaphor that I could use and came up with a spider luring its prey to its web but realizing the prey is smarter than it thinks.
Sophia Luo
Sophia Luo is a sophomore in high school in New York City. She loves to write poetry and short stories and is looking to explore different genres of writing. She loves to read and her favorite book changes constantly, but at the moment it is The Hate U Give.
