This became my ritual because of the unattainableness of her. How she could be reduced to a fantasy for such long stretches of time—just a memory, an echo of a reflection of a dream I may have had—only to suddenly snap back into existence should I look at just the right time. It was a game that I played in the quietude in the shoppe, wagering with myself whether she would be there if I should turn my eyes to the window at that moment. I liked to think that only in the perfect condition, she would materialize out of the sunshine onto that balcony, into that chair, or maybe she grew into it like a climbing vine, either way looking skyward.

But I, I was never the type to pursue. She could have stayed a dream for all I was good at nourishing and coaxing, which was not at all; I would have let her hover just out of reach forever. I would have accepted that, and yet fate still had its way of crossing strings.

Midway through February, I found myself in a nearby park flourishing with the roots of a community garden. I frequented the pathways during my evening strolls. That day was special, given the higher frequency of handholding I saw, the endless bushels of roses in clammy fists; my shift at the shoppe was busier than ever with lovers keen to impress. Valentine's Day. It never affected me. There wasn't anything I missed that day, because how could you miss something you didn't care for? But she came to me all the same, as if that winged babe Cupid had one last arrow to haphazardly fire, and it was me whom it struck. I saw her deviated from the footpath, rounding a corner adorned with polite hedges, looking as though she was searching for something. A cane in her hand surveyed the ground for some unbidden quarry.

A cane? Yes,

It was what drew my eyes back to the otherworldly stare she reserved for the sky, and not me, prying away at her from below. She never would have seen me down there. Not likely wouldn't have, not might have but ignored me; it was and always would be never, because I realized then that the stare wasn't meant for something that could be seen. This woman who I had discovered across the promenade, who I had made into my carefully crafted secret—she was blind.

At the very least, she could not perceive this garden the way I did. To ask her to pin her gaze on something, even me, was to tell her to breathe underwater. There was a split second in which I grappled with that displacing thought, but even that had not prevented my feet from moving when it occurred to me why she seemed to be searching. I was already crossing the grass for her.

I would tell you that thoughts raced through my mind on my way to her. I would say that my stomach churned with nerves and my heart shriveled with the fear that my approach would be unwelcome, but none of that really mattered; the world had stopped spinning when I first saw her, and when I crossed the threshold of closeness to her, it began again.

We were two elements that clashed with physical division, so rendered by our inherent atomic properties. With her light skin and light hair and pale lips, her hazy eyes that had ensconced daybreak within them, a frame so thin that the wind might take her away and clothed in a blue sweater and white denim jeans. But me? I am black water in a polar ocean. I was juxtaposed in front of her: dark hair and scuffed skin and brooding eyes, with the affability of a cold brick wall. So, you see—she was comprised of those cells nurtured by sunshine, and I was what remained when the light left, that organic matter festering underground. She was a plant sipping sunlight, and I was the rot of a forgotten carcass.

"You're looking for the path?" I asked, in hindsight, somewhat presumptuously.

Perhaps that is why she tilted her head toward me, but didn't move her eyes, and frowned. "Merely admiring the scenery," she spoke in a lofty and celestial voice, and then gripped her cane and tapped pointedly at the grass around my feet, inducing sarcasm. Sarcasm so light that the way it feathered the breeze could have masked it as a soothsayer's whisper.

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