she was the kind of girl that dreamt in gold and fire, and stared at things others couldn’t see. when she spoke, her words were weaved with a glittering light that it seemed only he could hear. she wore floral dresses and beat up moccasins, and ripped tights. she didn’t talk often, and it seemed that no one ever took the time to get to know her.
delicate wrists supported delicate hands, which penned fragile, soft words. he noticed her often lost in her battered red notebook, pausing and scratching out whole paragraphs.
he wanted to read those words she crossed out, hell, he just wanted to read anything she’d written. but there was a great distance between them, of a faltering high school hierarchy and crippling self-doubt. so instead of talking, he watched her. he’d be sitting with his football friends, but he’d never hear them. he couldn’t really hear anything when he looked at her. besides his own heartbeat, echoing in his head, over and over again like a mantra.
occasionally, she’d look up from the paper in front of her and look around, but she never saw him. his heartbeat, slow and steady, eyes trained on the small girl across the room from him. look at me. hear me. love me.
but his requests were swept up by wasted time, and their time together at their reluctant second home was coming to a close. it was a saturday, and the air was heavy with the promise of a drunken, sweltering summer. it was a night where everything looked like it was touched by a golden light, and he marveled in the way the sun stained the sky orange. smoke poured from his mouth, and he smiled. smoking on a swingset always seemed kind of ironic to him.
he didn’t hear footsteps until they were right behind him. he turned around, so the chains of the swing intertwined. she stood in front of him, a picture of quiet, muted beauty.
“fuck, you scared me.” he was never one for eloquence, unlike her. unlike her and the stories she weaved out of unsaid things and fleeting memories.
“those things are going to kill you, you know.” she said softly, and he looked into her eyes for what must have been the first time, because he had never noticed that her eyes were a shocking mix of blues and greens and yellow. kaleidoscope eyes. but did he expect anything else? eyes were the window to a soul, and her soul was anything but ordinary.
“you don’t know my name, do you?” the question stole his breath. of course he knew her name, was she kidding? he couldn’t talk, the question just seemed so absurd and foreign to her. he forgot that there was a world, a whole different reality, where no one knew his feelings for her.
“because i know yours. i write sometimes, its kind of weird but…” her words faltered, and she cast her gaze to the ground. he was so entranced by the way the sunlight made her hair look like it was almost red. fire. a flickering flame. he couldn’t take his eyes of her, so he almost missed what she said next.
“i told myself i wasn’t going to end school without giving this to you. i know you don’t know me, i know this is bizarre and i’m probably over-stepping some boundaries but i… i supposed i don’t really care anymore.” she handed him an envelope, with his name spelled out in looping cursive. he looked down at the letter, then at her. god, he loved her.
“thanks.” he said, at a loss for words. he always was. she smiled, maybe thats all she needed. they looked at each other, they looked at each other for a very long time, and he felt himself falling into her fire, until he was completely consumed by the flames. he reached out and touched her delicate wrist. his cigarette lay forgotten on the ground, and he stepped on it as he moved closer to her.
it was one kiss. one fleeting, evanescent memory of what could have been. it was bright, it was golden, it was sublime. she was sublime.
she left their town that summer, off to write her soft words with people that could appreciate them. the letter she gave him confessed all her passionate feelings, which she believed to be unrequited. she told him he reminded her of the wind that she heard outside her window, whispering into her window. she told him she wished that he hadn’t just been an idea to her; they could have been great. she told him all the things he wished he could say, but he never could find the words to express.
he’s grown up now. they never saw each other again, she got lost in the confines of his mind. he forgot what her voice sounded, and what colors she painted her nails, and what she looked like when she smiled. and realized that he didn’t have many pictures of her. her yearbook page showed only a quote of thoreau.
a truly good book teaches me better than to read it. i must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. what i began by reading, i must finish by acting.
and so he took the advice she had left him, and the rest of their class. he took to the page, just like she did. time passed, as it always does, and he had established himself as a writer. he had a life now, he had a reality. he had found love, and heartbreak, and love once more. he had lived.
but part of him still loved that delicate girl, in her floral dresses and faded flannel. he writes to keep the two alive, to forever suspend their ephemeral love in the golden light of that smoke filled summer afternoon.