She

She was the kind of girl who expected me to spend time with her parents, but who never wanted to meet my own family. When she spoke, it seemed as if all her sentences ended with commas--I found myself unable to turn my attention, never sure if her thought had finished or not.

She began conversations in the middle, choosing to introduce the topic and begin the debate with a different party or simply within the infinitude of her own consciousness.

"We're all just caught in the stream of life," she told me more than once.

"You're a rock, I'm a rock. We're all rocks, and we think we're moving because the current is flowing past us so quickly. It feels like we're moving, you know? Like when the car next to you pulls out and for a second you think your car is moving. But really, one day we'll all look down and see that we're covered in moss, sprouting miner's lettuce from our ears, and that our core is rotting away. Life is happening to us. Driftwood gets smashed across our faces, weeds and trash get stuck to us. But with time, it's all washed away. We're not in control. We're not living. What happens to us is what was meant to happen, what's been heading toward us for a long time."

I had heard similar philosophies, but I hadn't agreed with any one of them until the ideas dropped from her lips like pebbles into the pond of my mind. She gave me ripples.

I'd ask her questions, trying to know her so I could predict her.
"What were you like as kid?" I'd ask.
"What's your favorite color? Why is it your favorite?"
She'd look at me directly, and her gaze would veritably strip away my years (though whether this was the result of my self-conscious imagination or reality I'll never know) and then she would leave the conversation: if not in body, then in mental presence. If I asked too many questions I would lose her for a few days. I'd spend the hours holding my breath in solitude, afraid I had pushed too hard this time, afraid I'd never see her name attached to a text again. Then without warning she would be in my window, right foot planted firmly on the rug of my room, left leg swinging outside so that her toes brushed the dew-swept grass.

We became nocturnal, perhaps a direct result of the coffee she burned and drank by the pot, and we chose to spend our nights wandering the streets and fields and woods like we owned them all. The night I stared at her toes through a haze of smoke from the cigarette she had lifted from an older brother's jacket pocket, I had noticed the way some of the drops of dew had clung to her toenails. They glittered dully between the cracks of her two week old aubergine nail polish, like so many dying stars reflecting in my reddened eyes. I left the comfort of my window seat and settled onto the grass, not caring that my flannel pajama pants were immediately damp, and reached out to grab her swinging foot. I stroked the callused heel that was a result of too many barefoot summer days, and the soft pads of my unworked fingers caught on the roughness. I brushed my up around her jutting ankle bones, scratchy with stubble, and skimmed the soft skin on top of her foot. I looked up at her, at her emerald eyes and crumpled mass of dark hair, hazy in the light of the dying street lamp and the gentle glow of the cigarette dangling from her lips. "You're beautiful," I whispered quietly, as though I was talking to a skittish wild thing. For a moment, her eyes were locked onto mine, and I knew she could see every part of me that I didn't want her to see. She saw the part of me that was a little racist, and not as humble as I pretended. The parts that were quick to judge, and easy to anger. She saw me, understood me, and yet had chosen me.

She leaned in close, so that our foreheads touched. When her lips massaged mine my eyes were open. I was memorizing her breath, and she was caught in the stream of life. She pulled away, and caught my face between her hands.

"Play my game," she whispered. And so I followed her, with her laughing eyes and wandering hands--followed her into the eye of my own personal storm.

She would call until I answered, night or day. When she wanted me, I was the sole object of her attention. It was intoxicating, being wanted that hard. She was the reason I got a cell phone finally, a burner that came with five hundred minutes, as my parents didn't take to being woken at three am by eleven calls in a row. She laughingly called it my drug phone, saying that only dealers would be seen with a piece of crap that couldn't be worth more than twenty dollars. That phone became a beacon of hope, jangling around in my pocket, scratched by keys and filmy from my oily face. The numbers wore away after three months, coaxed off by my ever-typing fingers. Every time her she texted or called, her name emblazoned across the screen, my heart would jump up into my throat as if it was trying to get out to see her.

If she said she would be somewhere, it was almost guaranteed that she wouldn't be. If she said she would call, she didn't, and if I asked her a question in a text about doing something, I wouldn't hear from her for an un-calculated amount of time. To know her was to be intoxicated, and this intoxication led quickly to addiction.

If there was a strain of sweet love within my obsession with her, it was with that kernel of love that I based my justifications for my actions. I started smoking cigarettes--never inhaling--to remember what her mouth tasted like. I bought the same kind of deodorant she wore: men's Old Spice, the original scent. I became adept at reading her body language, always ready to catch her when the Bud Light became too much for her slight body. Her room, in the basement of her parent’s house, was littered with empty cans. If had known what a drinking problem looked like, perhaps this would have been a sign.

I stopped speaking to my friends. In return, texts and calls from them lessened. Why did I need anyone besides her? Who else understood the way my selfish mind worked, who else had opinions that matched all of mine?

We lay on the track at the middle school near my house. It was scattered with summer weeds, and heat lightening, a portent of a coming storm, glittered above us.

"It's not that I don't like gay people," she said suddenly, as if answering a question she'd heard in the far-off thunder, "it's just that I could never be one really. The adversity I'd have to face. And I don't think it would feel right."

I propped myself up on an elbow.

"I know what you mean. Like even if your body liked it, you would just feel like you were doing something you weren't supposed to be doing all the time. That guilty feeling." I reached out and took the cigarette that dangled from her lips. I took my own unlit cigarette, and pressed the tip to the tip of hers. Holding the end of mine in my hand, I began to breathe in quickly-- short, hard pulls--like she had taught me. My cigarette lit, and I handed hers back to her. When I met her eyes, she looked slightly horrified.

"What have I done to you?"

The air, thick with heat and un-fallen rain, seemed to close in around me, and I couldn't understand what she meant. What was so wrong with me doing what was natural to her?

She hated when I used big words, even though I couldn't help myself. I began to define automatically.

"With my mom? It's the constant pervasive-like, everywhere-threat of an altercation-like, a fight."

She'd laugh.
"I love how you define those words for me automatically."
I'd hang my head a little.
"Sorry, I know I do that all the time. I can stop."
She'd look away, comb her hair back hard with her fingers.
"No! I like it, I'm learning!"
Read: I feel stupid because of you. You're smarter than I am, and it bothers me.
It's almost impossible to feel like you're losing someone when your lives are tangled

together. She wore my clothes, and because she favored men's shirts I'd wear hers. She never complained that I stretched them out. We stopped using doors, and relied solely on windows to enter our respective houses. She slept in my room, on my floor, before on nights when we had finals so that I would wake her up. I slept in her room when she begged me to, holding her when she was drunk.

"Hold me," she'd moan. "please don't go, I can't be alone.”
I'd stroke her eyelashes, trace her sharp cheekbones, and cup her chin. When I put a finger

lightly on her eyelids, I could feel her eyes moving back and forth as she dreamed. My finger tip came away with a sheen of purpley eyeshadow on it, and I touched it to my cheek so that it would leave a mark. I'd leave before she woke up, stealing away in the cold gray dawn like wraith she was turning me into.

Why aren’t we allowed to know that we’ll never see someone again right before they disappear from our lives? Why doesn’t the universe allow us that one small cheat, a tip of a celestial hat to acknowledge the pitiful way we mere mortals cling to the contact of a certain being, especially the ones who we treasure? If I had known that I would never see her again, never be able to smell the way she smelled, touch the softness of her hair, press myself against her narrow collar bone as I cried or hold her as she laughed...I would have memorized her on that last night. I would have watched the way she walked, copied the way her fingers clenched oddly around her cigarette, tried to kiss her, because I owed myself that total leap of hope. If my hope had been punctured that night, then I would have been able to spend the next years re- inflating myself. Instead, my hope deflated in a slow, painful leak, propagated by the total removal of her presence from my existence.

The last time I saw her she was drunk, and I was afraid. I took her to house, too scared to touch her. She had been drawing away, spending time with a couple who were drifting their way through town. Their marijuana-addled conversations widened her eyes and made me roll mine. My phone rang less. I began to tread lightly, trading our once-provoking conversations for occasionally punctuated one-sided small talk, erring on the side of fear and caution while she lost interest.

We approached her window, and she pulled it open and stepped into her room. I felt hot, vapid fury swell as she began to close it without saying so much as a goodbye. I grabbed the bottom of the window before it closed, surprising her. I opened my mouth to say something—I will not go quietly into this night—but instead found her drunken eyes with mine. I saw her vision blur, her slight body sway. My hand twitched, almost reaching for her. It occurred to me that nothing had ever been so far from my grasp. I was a fish on the line she didn’t know she’d cast, a solo dancer in a couples contest, a hand groping over the edge of a cliff for someone who had already jumped. I tore away from her empty gaze—maybe she was never there at all—and left her for the last time. With the dawn would come that replenished hope, damning me with its persistence.

Without her, I was broken.

I called. Never-endingly, shamelessly, from my number, from blocked numbers, from pay phones, from phones when I was out of state, from stranger's phones that I borrowed under barefaced pretenses.

I cried. In the shower, at night, on the track and in the fields, until my parents found my year-old stash because my constantly red eyes raised suspicions.

I raged. Though writing, when I was drunk to anyone who would listen, and to the stormy night skies until they opened up on me and threatened to drown me.

Finally, I gave up. I returned to the land of the living, and began to talk to my friends again. I stopped smoking cigarettes, only drank socially, and began sleeping at night. My heart stopped leaping when I got texts or calls. I traded my burner for a smartphone, and began wearing polo shirts. I joined the golf team, and got a partial scholarship to college. One could call it all mundane. One could call me mundane.

And yet...I taste her through second-hand smoke, smell her in the deodorant aisle. I see her in the shadows that move only at night. When I have one drink too many I can feel her eyes quivering beneath my fingertips. She is in me deeply, written into the DNA that makes up my senses. On the nights when I’m angry at her for leaving, for disappearing and refusing to answer my final questions, it’s as if I can see her plainly, like she’s standing right next to me.

"We're all just caught in the stream of life. We're not in control. We're not living. What happens to us is what was meant to happen, what's been heading toward us for a long time."

I argue back, wanting to be in charge of my own destiny.

"The sooner you accept the inevitable--like, what's going to happen no matter what--the sooner you'll be happy, David.”

I smile, thinking to myself that her vocabulary is improving. But before I can tell her, the she inside of me is gone, vanished until my latent anger and quiet desperation are palpable enough to give her memory solidity once again.