Beautiful

Memoir of a first acquaintance.

I remember meeting her as clear as a Sommerset sky.  Despite the innumerous passage of time and the creep of oblivion on the memory, one can never relinquish the first distinct and lingering memories of acquainting such an ethereal and symphonic radiance as hers.  Like the intaglio impressions on stone, her opalescent visage still rings clear through my unseen halls, resounding as a bell through the silent night.    While Cather had her Ántonia, James his Isabel, Poe his Annabelle Lee, and Fitzgerald his Daisy, so too I have my ------ to captivate my thoughts and permeate my humble scratchings.  From the first fleeting glimpses of her gossamer skin and the hypnotizing tenderness of her gaze, my disembodied steps took me both inexorably and purposefully towards that glimmering image.  That first stumbled “hello,” the initial flood of nervous emotion and palpable hesitation, contrived for an atmosphere more akin to an awed aficionado and his query than a simple introduction between peers.  I recollect the echo filled hall and tension bound in sweaty palms and smitten anticipation, as she softly responded, “nice to meet you.”

In that singular portion of a heartbeat's duration, my eyes began to truly see the grace and frailty of her stature; the picturesque composure of her vibrance and charming allure.  I saw her hidden introversion and quiet, almost quaint intelligence that shone through clear, striking eyes.  ------'s iridescence captivates the room and enthralls my attentions but for a few evanescent moments of her beguiling, ethereal conversation; I am awe-struck as the young Eros to the Psyche of his dreams.  Her presence donates both a deluge of elegant yet wanton enchantment and an otherworldly, enervating glow that penetrates through the muddled tanglements of obsolete words and inadequate allusions.  The Spanish have a phrase for this amorous reaction so sudden and whole it can only be thought of as brought by Mercury's own hand: “La Raya del Trueño,” the thunderbolt.  Like the natural phenomenon, she captures me with the symphonic notes of her voice and the stunning pearlescence of her honest smile.  Would my fluttering pulse ever calm, or could these be an internal assonance to the beat of her drum?  The gentle wash of roan brown hair falling across the soft curves of her face, polarizing and framing her opal-jade eyes, the subtle curves of her lips and delicate porcelain edge of her chin: like Velázquez before me, I have found my genteel Venus.  I bathe in the brilliance of her refined figure: the slightness of her shoulders, the flowing lines and contours from her waist and hips, her tender, immaculate hands, the soothing warmth of her idyllic, arresting posture, and the delicate smallness of her feet.  The lady elopes me using a calm, reticent attraction nearly unbearable to circumvent or surmount; the pools of coy intrigue intermingled with a grasping, hypnotizing quality that entices and spellbinds.  ------ endears one last smoldering gaze before we part, and I am endowed, emboldened, enflamed in the contrivance to win her, have her, hold her Madonna-esque salience in my arms.  The final parting wisps of her bouquet, celestial as the waning moon, wafts over me, carrying that discreet yet organic and scintillating encounter away, and leaving my still-throbbing existence with a serenity of yearning more powerful than even the tectonic machinations of the earth.