For Her

One.

She was like a moon beam; she was white, in the clothes covering her body and the color of her face. She was vanilla; from her scent to the photo of the flower she captured with a film camera. She was pale, with untainted innocence and baby soft lips. She was ivory, with the smoothness of her skin to the way she walked with heels on marble floors. She was a moonbeam; bright and shining, scintillating in a word surrounded by darkness.

I needed her, more than I could ever need drugs in my body or alcohol down my throat; I craved her more than the tobacco craved to be between my teeth, or the heroin craved to flood my veins.

I sure as hell wasn’t the lightning, though, and I had to admit, whatever the fuck went into our souls, hers and mine might as well have been crafted under two different skies in two different times.

She was beautiful, and I was solely, utterly captivated by that. I didn’t understand how one girl, small and frail, fragile with her small frame, could ever be so gorgeous. She was beautiful, adorable, perfect. I could look at her, with my plain eyes, for hours without ever understanding how she retained conspicuous perfection.

I don’t really remember how it even started; to me, there was no start; my love for her was perpetual, is perpetual. It just is, just like I just am, and I can’t remember a time it wasn’t.

I was in love with her; all of her. It was her smile, her voice, her brain, and everything in it; I was completely in love with her, and everything I knew she would become.

It’s obvious. My eyes project what’s on my mind, and her reflection is on reruns.  It always has been, and I have no doubt it always will.

I knew I was in deep when I would have a drink with my friends, and the lightly clothed bartender couldn’t take my mind off of her. I realized just how much she was on my mind when I couldn’t take a sip of seltzer without picturing her disgusted scrunched nose, or when I’d throw my hand over the empty passenger seat when my car abruptly stopped. I knew I loved her when I was grocery shopping and I found myself subconsciously adding her favorite foods to my cart, because my subconscious was most certainly in love with her too.

A lot of people would consider this a problem. But me, no. She took my life in her hands and brought it so close to her heart that it all just seeped in, residing inside her, completely dependent on her for survival. And I was okay with that.

The hard part, though, was waiting until they let her out of school, because five days a week I would wake up and her head wouldn’t be on my chest and her body wouldn’t be by my side, and I’d have to carry on with my day until the afternoon when I could finally take her home and even though she would sit on my bed or the couch and do her school work and I would be at my desk doing mine, the center of my universe was closer to me. I didn’t have to worry about a school shooting or terrible weather outside, because if she was with me, I knew there was less of a chance she’d get hurt, because I’d save her before myself a thousand times over.

If anything happened to her, my life would be ruined. I know that. I’m fully aware that my perspective of bright, shining center of the universe is within her and without her there’d be nothing left, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

~

Maybe it was in the way her hair looked thrown on the top of her head, messy with a band wrapped somewhere around it,  or how her tiny hands hid on the inside of her sweatshirt sleeves, but I couldn’t get enough. Her eyes were never rimmed with black goo or gel, her face was always free of powdery residue, and only her lips were coated in Burt’s Bees.

When I sat in my room, lying on a mattress with a blanket that could never be as soft as her hair, I pictured her. I pictured her fully, in any way that I could: her face, her laugh, her writing, her voice. I pictured her splashing through rain puddles wearing knitted grey socks with hunter green boots. I thought about what it would be like if we took a trip to Hawaii, seeing her sitting on the beach with an umbrella in her drink. Sometimes I pictured her in Alaska, us cuddling on a green fleece couch while watching a lovely sun rise; with her, it always does.

I liked the picture of Alaska better.  I liked imagining the cold, so I didn’t have to think about the sweating. As I laid in my bed with the blanket at my knees and arms fighting to find space clinging to my chest, I clenched my eyes tight, and pretended the boiling sweat was not flooding from each and every one of my pores, scorching my skin and burning the inside of my body.

Instead, I thought of ice. I pictured her sitting on a wooden sled while I held a rope, pulling her about snow. I imagined the sounds the ocean might make crashing on glaciers rather than sand, or at least sand the temperature of glacier ice. I pictured her ruddy cheeks and reindeer nose becoming more prominent as we took walks through high grass, or trudged through marshy grounds in rain boots. And that, in itself, was distraction enough.

Sometimes just thinking about her eyes lead me to remembering a fleeting recollection. I had many memories of her; she was on my mind every day, minute, moment, and second, all in the hopes I could spend each of those moments in her presence. So of course, in a time where I am lacking, all of my temporary recollections of her infiltrated my mind, replaying in my head like the films we watched on her laptop. Except these were worse, because when I close my eyes, I’m there, because had been there at one point, but when I open them, I realize I could never be there again.

No matter if I brought her a dozen roses in her favorite shade of pink or sang to her with a guitar in my hands, it could never go back to the way it used to be.

And maybe that’s why I liked to remember. I’ve heard countless people say remembering is too painful, but I speak from experience, not remembering is even worse.

~