Wild Eyed

Life moves people and people move life. She moved you.

It’s kind of funny, watching her like this. She so rarely seems restful. She’s always doing something; I can see her energy even as she’s sleeping. Still, wrapped up in the blankets and tucked into my arms, she is so peaceful.

When I first met her, she was running down the street. I wasn’t looking where I was going, this is New York City; people sense and move aside but they don’t look. But she ran straight into me. She fell back and I offered her a hand but she simply got up and ran away, yelling an apology after her.

She’d dropped a card, a business card. I picked it up, mostly out of curiosity. It was a pretty little thing, I guess, a bit too brightly coloured for my tastes, though. I don’t remember anymore which hack business plan that one was, but I remember putting it in my pocket.

I didn’t look at it again for another few weeks, long and boring weeks of frantically trying to finish my very last paper before I was finally free of the commercialised hell that is the private university, and even more frantic interviews with publishers.

The day we were finally done, Dani and Red wanted to drag me to a club. They did that a lot, party. Instead, I went home and had a shower that may or may not have lasted half an hour before transitioning into a very hot bath with candles and a book that I’m pretty sure lasted nearly an hour and another half.

I was trying to maneuver through what should have looked like an apartment when I banged into the third book pile that week and knocked that business card out. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about her, after that.

I lay in bed that night, trying to remember what she’d looked like; I’d only gotten a little glimpse between the time it took for her to crash into me, for me to look up from under my hood, and for her to run away.  She was blonde, I knew that.

I finally picked up that card and followed the streets down to her little store. I remember thinking it was surprisingly normal coloured. She’d rushed out of the back when the little door chime announced me. She looked so ecstatic. She was remembered me immediately, and worse, she was beautiful.

She gave me this big, crooked smile that stretched her whole face and crinkled up her eyes and her nose. Her eyes are green, a dark mossy green. She was, still is, pale enough to pull off the near white blonde curls that bounced whenever she moved.

She had hugged me like an old friend and told me that she knew I’d find her, somehow. She hadn’t known she’d dropped one of her cards.

I hadn’t really understood the concept of talking for hours about nothing until I stayed in that dusty little shop with her. I helped her with customers and we talked.

It was surreal, everything was. Being out of university finally, being friends with someone like her, all of it.

We moved into an apartment together. I told myself my eagerness to live with her was for the rent cuts of having two tenants. I wasn’t very convincing, even in my head.

I finally got one of my books published. I signed a deal with a magazine for my poetry.  She sold some paintings, trained as a masseuse for a while, earned some pretty good money for until she got bored.

And then she told me she was going to move to Europe, to make it easier to travel the world as a photographer. That week was so dark; I didn’t want her to leave. She was the only bright thing in my life. I’m still so dreary.

She tells me that the day she asked me to come with her was the day she first saw me happy. I lit up, overjoyed. We sorted through everything and combined all of our things, to make space in the moving of course, and sold or gave away everything else.

We bought a house together, in France. I had taken French and German both through high school and university but she didn’t speak a lick of French. I think that’s why she wanted to move there. She picked it up right away; she always did have such a way with words.

I still sent in my poetry to that little magazine in Maine, even after I’d finished and published three series of books and five outside of that, even after years of travelling with her and starting up bad business ventures and reviewing restaurants for famous columns.

I’m not sure when I fell in love with her.

Maybe it was that very first day, with the wind wild hair and the frantic scramble to be where she needed to be. Or maybe it was when we first moved in together; I’d always known she was so beautiful, though then I had never thought of love.

She tells me it was that day in Africa. She had dragged me hiking through the ungodly heat, not to mention the bugs, of the savannah. It had been getting dark and the wind blew through her hair and I couldn’t help but kiss her.

She was sweaty, we both were, and we smelled of bug spray and sun screen. And I would never ask for a more perfect first kiss.

She had been so surprised, round eyed and stiff. I had pulled back, to apologize, when she grabbed my hair with both hands and kissed me with a ferocity I’d not seen her give to anything but her various works.

I still see that wild eyed girl in her eyes when she looks at me, though her hair really is white now and the crinkles around her eyes don’t go away. I know, that no matter how many years it’s been, she will always been that delicate little girl with the messy hair and the huge eyes that slammed into me that very first day.

Cheesy, isn’t it? But to this day, she still thinks she’s that girl. She drags me up the trails and down to the lake when I’m not writing. She tells me I should retire, I made her when her lungs started to give out and it became too dangerous for her to be on the tops of five inch wide rock spires to take pictures.

She plants flowers now, when she’s not telling me to retire or dragging me along on an adventure. I still love her, that little girl and now this woman. Although, when she stands in the sun, waving up from that garden at me in my little study, I still see that naïve girl with the dew drop smile and the little white sundress.