And then he kissed me

We talked about random things.  We talked about silly things and got to know each other.  He was nice and kind and inquisitive but not creepy.  He was equally interested in knowing things about me than he was talking about himself.  He wasn’t secretive or evasive.  It was a great first conversation and I left it smiling.

Then we talked about what we were doing.  What we like to do and where we’ve been.  We talked about the past and things we’d love to do in the future.  Some of the things he’s done that I’d love to do.  We joked about doing the same thing but at different times in the same place.  We reminisced and fantasized along the same plane of existence.

After that we talked about our actions.  Things we do and ways we act.  Various likes and dislikes and how we can’t understand how other people don’t share our likes or dislikes.  We came up with cutesy nicknames for each other based on these and teased each other based on others.  The words adorable and cute were bandied about in my direction and I told him to stop making me smile so much because my cheeks are starting to hurt.

Eventually the conversations led to something slightly more risque.  It was hot and I was hot and he seemed hot.  I was more empirically hot in the sense that I was sweating from the heat, while I found him more and more appealing with every conversation we had.  I looked forward to them.  When he would text me and say hello I would light up.  I had to contain myself slightly because I didn’t want to seem too eager and come off as desperate.
He asked what I was doing and I told him, purposefully, that I was folding laundry in slightly more than no clothing.  His attention was always readily available but his tone changed.  His words went from fun and flirty to flirty and suggestive.  I suggested just as much and we suggested each other doing very suggestive things.
We slipped back, comfortably, into our usual conversation of silly and fun to goodnight and in bed.  A smile permanently plastered on my face as I drifted off to sleep.  

Soon after we decided to get together to test the chemistry and physics, to see if the pull was just as strong and the reactions at the same intensity.  We met and we shared a drink.  We smiled and laughed.  The laughs were genuine and held in reserve for fear of looking too comfortable.  I don’t know why.
The drinks turned into more drinks which turned into a bit of food.  I can eat in front of him?  Wow.
Hours might have gone by, or just a single one I’m not really sure.  It was a great time, just as good as our texting and then better on top of it.  Better because I could see his blue eyes behind his glasses.  I could watch his smile when I did something dumb that he said was adorable.  There was even that moment I got to feel his hand along mine while his fingers dragged over my palm to see if he could make me shiver.  It was amazing and I didn’t want it to end, but it had to.

We got to my car, because he walked me to my car.  We smiled our goodbyes and hugged our regrets behind them.  We stood under the streetlight which, itself, was under the stars.  The busy, warm night was all around us and even though it couldn’t have gone any better I wish it wouldn’t have stopped and was a little sad that it was ending.  Would this be the best night we had together and it only just began?  I’m always so negative.

And then he kissed me.

Do you see me?

“This is basically like a menu for people.”

She wasn’t wrong.  Dating had become a strange phenomenon.  There wasn’t any spark or meet cute involved anymore.  Now it was similar to the way a couple picks a sperm donor or, as Melody said, the way a person picks their food off of a menu.

“Yeah, but Mel, attraction plays a role things anyway right?  I mean, come on, when you’re seeing someone from across the room, as all the songs say, you’re only noticing them because of their looks right?  So, here you are.  Seeing someone from across the city.”

“Not the same,” she was still a romantic.

“Of course it is,” I wasn’t.

She shook her head in response, “no it isn’t.  Not even close.  You can’t get that feeling from a picture of a person you’ve never known before.  Someone you’ve never seen before.  It’s not the same.”

“Fine, tell me why then.”

She turned towards me with her hands in front of her.  They were pointing at me like arrows and she was attacking my assumption that online dating and meeting someone in the real world for the first time are the same.  She was riding her horse and she was going to die on it in battle.

“So many reasons!”

“Such as?”

“Pictures lie, for starters.  Its a snapshot of a person.  They might be pretty but what if they have a terrible voice.  What if they walk funny.  What if they smell bad?”

I laughed, “so you’re reason why online dating isn’t as good is even more superficial than online dating?  Wow Mel.  Wow.”

“No!”  She laughed and pushed me, “it’s the reality.  The reality of all of your senses telling you that someone is the one.  Or, potentially.  You can watch the way they interact with other people.  You can see the way their smile slowly creeps across their face.  The sound of their laugh, a genuine laugh, when someone says something funny.”

She stopped for a second and dropped her eyes from my face and looked at her shoes.

“The way your body trembles the first time they brush up against you in the slightest way and you catch the scent of them whether its cologne or the soap they use or just their natural smell.”

She paused again and fidgeted.

“You remember those things.  They mean something.  They develop in your head and fester until you become obsessed with them.  You make up fake conversations that you have with them about the first time you noticed them and you pretend they noticed you for the first time then too.  It’s a story you create in your head because the reality is they don’t know you exist and you’re too afraid they won’t care when they find out you do.”

Melody wiped her eyes and sniffled then picked her head up and smiled at me.

“Why would you want to deprive yourself of that by meeting someone online, huh?  Isn’t it grand?  Doesn’t it sound wonderful?”

She tried to laugh it off and turn to the computer.  She clicked through a few profiles.  She found someone who looked nice.  He wasn’t too attractive but he wasn’t someone who spent most of their life in dark hallways either.

“He’ll do I guess.”

“I guess?”  I looked at her with my forehead making all kinds of squiggly lines.

“Yeah I don’t know.  He seems nice.”

“Mel, you don’t want someone who seems nice.  You want someone who seems amazing.  You want-,” I stopped this time.  She picked her head up and looked me in the eyes with tears floating on the brink of escape and I stopped talking just to stare at her.

You don’t always remember the moment you really noticed someone.  You always knew them and who they were and you looked at them hundreds, if not thousands of time, but you never can remember the moment when you first noticed something specific about them.  Like the way they smile or the motion they wave their hand in when they pull their hair behind their ear.

Right then I noticed the way she looked at me with her teary, reddened eyes and I looked back at her and my mind spoke up out of turn and asked if I had ever noticed how beautiful she was when she cried.

I shook my head.  I couldn’t answer.  I couldn’t say out loud that I hadn’t and talk to myself like a psycho, but I did notice.  I saw her looking at me and staring into my eyes and she was so beautiful that I wanted to kiss her.

I didn’t though.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t even know what that was.  Why was I looking at her like that after all of these years of knowing her?  It didn’t make sense.

I shook my head and mumbled something.  She turned away and we decided that online dating would have to wait.  We went out for ice cream instead and sat on a bench until the sun fell and the moon splashed stars across the sky.  We talked and laughed and sat in silence.  It was one of the best days of that summer and I’ll never forget it.  It was the day that I realized I liked her.  It was the day when I truly understood what she meant about online dating.  It was the day I saw how beautiful she was when she cried and when I vowed to never see her cry again.

Compliments

“I love the way you write,” she said, and it was the beginning of the end.

It was the beginning of the beginning, but I’ve always fallen for easy compliments on things I’m self conscious about.  My hair.  My clothes.  My voice and my writing.  All it took was sincerity in her voice, perceived or actual, and I was overlooking a vast ravine and wanting to jump into the nothingness just to hear her say it again.

“Sorry, what?”  Never take a compliment for a compliment unless you hear them say it twice.  You may have misheard it and they said something different, or they were just being nice and will dismiss anything said previous.

“Your writing,” she held the piece of paper and shook it as if it had bells hanging from the edges, “I love the way you put words down.  The expressiveness.  The visuals.  The oddity and randomness of it.  I really like a lot.”

Does she really like it a lot or does she love it?

“Thanks.  Yeah.  I don’t know.  I just kind of dump my mind onto paper sometimes.  I don’t really know where it comes from.”

“Well its nice.  You should do it more often.”

Now it’s just nice.  I should have just said thanks and left it at that.

I nodded and smiled a closed-lip half smile and kept my head down.  I wanted to write some more but nothing was coming into my head.  Nothing except that she might have been staring at me.  I was too nervous to look up and confirm it so my pen just swirled around the letters on the newspaper in front of me where I had been writing in the margins.

It was out of boredom really.  Sitting random places doing random things.  My cellphone was the high quality, super rare kind that could still only make phone calls.  It probably could take pictures too but computers nowadays didn’t have the sophistication to handle the tens of hundreds of pixels it was capable of capturing.  So busying myself like everyone else in the room with their necks crooked and faces glowing against the light of the tiny screen wasn’t really an option.
So I would grab a piece of paper nearby and entertain myself.  Often times it would be a newspaper or a magazine.  I’d never take a current one in case someone wanted to read it, but there was usually a day old paper laying around so I would grab that and paint the canvas with my nonsense.

Most of the time it was literally complete nonsense.  I would keep my head down and listen to the conversations going on around me.  I would start writing parts of them and then take off from there into a world of the bizarre pieced together with fragments of reality.  When I was done, or my time was up, I would leave the little piece of brilliance on the table for someone else to enjoy or become perplexed by, either way it was out of my head and splashed across the page and I’d never even remember what it was a few hours later.

I wasn’t even sure anybody read any of it.  I thought someone might read a few words and then furrow their brow at the oddness then toss the paper in the trash.  I didn’t think people actually sat down and made it through everything.  It was a chore, and I partially did it as a joke.  I would sometimes end the writing saying that the reader has wasted minutes of their life they’ll never get back reading my nonsense.  Yet, here she was seemingly reading every word.

I finally let my eyes come up for air and took a quick glance at her.  She wasn’t staring at me but it looked as if she might have been side-eyeing my paper as the tip of my pen swirled along the words of the bold headline.  Was she waiting for me to write more so she could watch?  Strange.

When I brought my eyes up and not-so-smoothly took a look at her to see if she was watching me she noticed and caught my eyes with a smile.

“Well ran dry?”  she asked.

I shook my head, “no just the right inspiration hasn’t come along yet.”

“Oh.  What kind of inspiration do you need?”

I looked down away from her engaging smile and interrogating eyes, “I kind of know it when I see or hear it.  It takes a hold of me and my mind unfurls like a flower.  I don’t really control it.”

“Unfurls like a flower huh?”

I nodded.

“That’s kind of poetic.  Those visuals I was talking about.”

I don’t know if it was being conveyed on the outside of my skin but on the inside I was feeling flush and blushing.  I’m not used to praise or admiration in anything I do.  It always felt fake whenever anyone would say something nice and I never know how to take a compliment.  I froze and she kept talking.  I felt like I was sweating.  I completely forgot how to communicate with another person.

“I uh, yeah.  I don’t know.  I-, uh, uh huh.  I’m like-, uh, heh,” I wanted to bang my head on the desk and groan so loud but she was still staring at me, or at least it felt like she was.  She was still sitting there trying to engage with me and my tongue’s decided to swell three sizes too big and cut the circulation off to my brain.

“You know you could just write about me,” she tilted her head down and tried to catch my lowered eyes.  I looked up with my mouth slightly open in surprise.

“Uh…huh?”  I always gave the most eloquent responses when confused.  This is why I preferred to communicate in written word, I could write a hundred times better than I could speak.

“Me.  If you don’t know what to write about then write about me.  Make me a character.”

She was smiling.  Why was she smiling?  Write about her?  What?

“What would I even write about?”  I had forgotten about my awkwardness and engaged in the puzzle of what/huh/what are you talking about.

“I don’t know.  You’re the writer.  I’m just trying to give you some inspiration.  Selfishly of course.  I want to read what you’re going to write next and if its about me I’m curious to see where you’ll take that story so, yeah.  You can just write about this, right here.  Our conversation.  A back and forth and see where it goes.”

I wish she would stop making eye contact.  It’s so annoyingly polite and she was being too nice.  It felt like a trap but I couldn’t help it if it was.  She was asking me to write.  She requested my words written down for her.  The abyss was long and wide and never ending and I was going to fill it with words for her.  About her.
They would build a bridge from one end to the next and she could walk along it and peer over the edge to see all of the beautiful things I’d constructed below.

And all it took was for her to say, I love the way you write.

Buy me a drink?

“So, what is it?  What’s got you staring at me across the room without a word to say until now?”

Oona took a sip from her drink as she waited for the man’s answer.

They had been bantering for a short while.  She approached him and asked if he minded some company.  He didn’t object.  Men usually don’t when she approaches them, although it is a rare occurrence.

The conversation was odd to her.  There were no pleasantries or introductions.  No attempt was made inquiring on her availability or current activities, but at the same time he was pleasant and inviting.  He seemed to enjoy her company and was quick with a response to anything she said.

“I’d venture to guess you’re used to men staring at you,” he smiled and hovered his drink below his  lips.

“I am,” she smiled with her lips on her glass.

“And often, I’m sure, they’ve lost to ability to form words.”

Oona raised her glass and nodded slightly before resting it on the table.

“But I don’t care about them.  I want to know about you.  The man who has yet to introduce himself.  The man who doesn’t make eye contact the entire time, but not because he’s shy but because he’s somewhat over confident.  The man who has yet to offer me another drink, a night cap in his room or breakfast the next morning.  I want to know something about this man, in particular.”

He nodded and smiled as he rested his drink next to hers, “and if he answers that you’ll have to tell him what brought you over here to sit next to that man and carry on a conversation with him for this long.  He doesn’t think that happens often with you.”

“He’s right, it doesn’t.  And she might answer that, if his answer is intriguing enough.”

The man smiled and dipped his head slightly in a soft laugh to himself.  He shifted his weight and position so it was facing her in an engaging way.  His left knee bent and resting on the couch with his left arm leaning over the back of it.

“This man.  Me.  I’ve been here a few nights this week actually.  The first night was Tuesday.  On Tuesday I sat over there,” he pointed to a table in the corner of the lounge against the wall.

“And while I was sitting over there on Tuesday around 10, I noticed a beautiful woman come in and sit down at the bar.  She ordered a drink and had conversations with the men sitting next to her and the bartender.  She had a roaring laugh.  She was captivating and I tried my hardest to keep my eyes from burning a hole in her dress.”

He picked up his drink and threw back a quick gulp of whatever liquid remained in it and rested the glass on his knee.

“On Wednesday night I took up the same seat at the same table.  Partially out of my penchant for not wanting to be noticed, and partially out of superstition.”

“Superstition for what?”  Oona asked.

“Whether she would come back or not the next night.”

“Did she,” she smiled at him and leaned forward slightly as if he were telling her a secret.

“She did.  She absolutely did.  My budding obsession wasn’t helped any either.  That night she was wearing a red dress that was made from material which was close relatives of some of my favorite lingerie pieces.  She looked as if she had come back from a fancy art gala or awards ceremony.  Only there was a problem,” he lowered his head and leaned into her lean and played on her whisper receiving position.

“What was it?”  Her voice played along, almost by accident.

“She didn’t sit at the bar.  I couldn’t see her after she walked in.  Being a man who doesn’t like commotion and being noticed I thought that getting up to move to have better viewing of this goddess of a woman would be too much, so I accepted my fate and took the glance that I was given and turned in early that night.”

“Poor you.  That must have devastated you, not being able to ogle her all night again,” Oona’s voice was mockingly sympathetic.

“I was crushed,” he nodded back, “but I survived.  Although it took an extra day to feed the survival.  My Thursday did not lend itself to ogling and I was unable to look upon this beauty for the third day in the row.  I had to wait until Friday to see her again and she did not disappoint.”

“Was she dressed in a royal gown, tiara while brandishing a scepter this time?”  Oona tilted her head in a crook while staring into his eyes.

“No, no.  She in a skirt, a blouse and some elegant heels with her hair done in a tight and professional manner.  A business woman, a princess and bawdy laughter.  She was a dream.  I took this couch on Friday night, the one we’re sitting on right now.  It has a better view of the entire lounge and, if she were so concerned, it seems a bit more inviting than a table in the corner.”

“True.  Pretty girls aren’t drawn to dark tables in corners with men they’ve never met.”

“Her demeanor was more reserved last night, Friday night.  She seemed tired.  Perhaps from the day.  Maybe from the week.  Her smile was still bright but she was subdued.”

“Poor soul.”

“She seemed to fair well.”

“No, I meant you,” Oona placed her hand on his knee, “you waited an entire extra night to see her and she wasn’t putting on her show for you.  It must have been tragically disappointing.”

The man smiled at her and bit his lower lip.  He shook his head and then looked Oona in the eyes.

“I survived.”

“Again?”

He nodded, laughing softly to himself once more, “again.”

She stared at him, waiting for the story to finish.

“So, she never joined me.  I don’t believe we exchanged a glance at all really.  She left early that night and I did shortly after her.  Which brings us to tonight.”

“Which brings us to tonight,” she repeated.

“What time is it?”

Oona pulled her phone from her purse to check, “nearly midnight.”

The man pointed at the bar, “do you see the woman with the blonde hair in the black dress?”

Oona turned to look at the bar and noticed a beautiful woman sitting at the bar carrying on a conversation with two men, one on either side of her.

“She came in at nearly the same time you did.  I watched you both sit down and order drinks.  I watched you both get comfortable and carry on with whatever purposes you have being here.  I watched you both, carefully, for about fifteen minutes when my initial intention was to stare at this blonde woman at the bar for the entirety of my night.  As time went on my attention turned more and more to you.  Your dark hair and your green dress.  Your blue eyes and your red lips.”

He paused and stared at her for a moment.  He was waiting for a reaction.  She didn’t want to give him one because if she spoke she might have cracked.

“Mmhmm?”  This was all she could muster, with a slight head nod.

“I’m not comparing you two woman.  You’re both beautiful.  Stunning in your own way.  I don’t find her any less enthralling tonight then I did the previous nights.  But you, you make me want to let you notice me.”

Oona cleared her throat, “and then what?”

“I’d ask you to be my muse.”

“What does that mean?”  She shook her head gently.

“To let me stare at you and your beauty.  To let me use the inspiration you stir in me to create my own beauty with words.  To embody every passionate, lust-filled, craving of your sexuality in each drop of ink I spill.  To immortalize you as desire.”

Oona didn’t know what to say.  She wasn’t sure how to respond to something so intense and personal.  All she could do was stare at him with her hand still on his knee and try to keep her lip from quivering.

“I’m sorry if that answer was a little forward.   I hope it was intriguing enough though,” he smiled again.

“Intriguing enough for what?”

“For you to tell me what brought you over here.”

“Oh,” she laughed a little to herself, “I was just hoping you would buy me a drink and I’d see where it went from there.”

“How’s it going then?”

“A little awkward now,” she gave a tight lipped grin while holding her empty glass.

“Is it?  Is that a no to my question then?”

“What question was that?”

“Would you be my muse?”

“What is it I have to do?”

“Absolutely nothing,” he took her hand in his and stared in her eyes, “just be yourself and let me witness it.”

 

There is no sleep that is peaceful

The sirens are blaring.  They cut through the night and hit as if you were their only target.  It would be painful if it wasn’t terrifying.  The sound ripping through the air.  Jolting you from sleep as it gets louder.  Louder.  LOUDER.  Then fading off only to come back to torture you again.

Sometimes it stops.  When the threat is gone and people can go back to their normal lives as if they hadn’t been shaken to their knees.
Sometimes its only a warning.  A drill.  A cruel joke being played on everyone to ensure they know what to do when their lives are in real danger.  The drills are only ever set during the day though, in the light hours.  If the siren goes off when the sky is dark the scramble to survive sets in.

The sirens are sounding, still.  You can hear the commotion in the streets.  The screaming and yelling.

“Move!  Now!”

“Go!  We have to go!”

“Leave it!  Shoes, clothes, bags on your back and move!”

Children screaming.  Crying for a fear that they don’t know.  Parents heart’s racing for one they know too well.

The sirens continue without pause.  A streak of light screams through the air and everything stops.  Everything moves in slow motion as the flaming ball of light disappears behind the hills.  It’s followed by a rumble.  The ground is shaking.  The hills are on fire and the night sky is melting.

The sirens keep blaring.  This is not a drill.  They are coming.

Drunken Poets Tell The Truth

“I favor eating your pussy to all others, dear Ruby,” the old man exclaimed in slurred words while leaning over papers at his desk.

“Charming,” replied the young woman from the bed a few feet away, “it’s amazing those words of yours aren’t published and plastered across newspapers far and wide.”

He sneered back at her, “same could be said of your cunt.”

She rolled over and put her back to him.  The sheet bunched up between her legs and balled against her chest.  She hugged it tight for comfort instead of warmth.  The raging fire in the furnace was enough to keep the entire street warm, yet he kept the window open all winter as well.

“I think better in between temperatures,” he would tell anyone who asked, and there were plenty.  He’d invite people up to his room to drink beyond closing hours of the bar he lived above.  There would be women as well, prostitutes, he would spend whatever money on he had that he didn’t imbibe.  There were no shortage of people in and out of his tiny apartment.

Tonight it was Ruby.  That wasn’t her real name but she hadn’t used her real name in so long that it may as well have been.  She had heard about the old man that lived above the bar and all of the stories that went along with him.  His eccentricities.  How he would rant and drink and give a girl whatever she wanted if she seemed interested.  His bluntness and the bit of mean streak that he carried, it was mostly words but he could look threatening if he wanted to.  Nobody ever claimed he harmed them though.

He also had money, which was the most important thing to a woman selling her body for sexual favors.  It really was the only thing that mattered.

The old man always paid and he usually paid more than the agreed upon amount.

“He’s a great tipper,” the other girls told Ruby when she got the call.

“He’ll fuck you, he’ll drink, he’ll rant and when he falls asleep you just take the money and slip out like nothing.  There’s no pleading for more time or trying to set up another date.  It’s a quick transaction and usually doesn’t even last the whole night.”

Every Great City Needs Ruins

“Do you know what I like about where we live?  It has a history.  People were here before us.  Long before us.  There might have been two people here like us hanging out when this hundred-year-old structure was brand new.  There may have been hundreds of people walking along here and stopping to take pictures and feed the ducks.  There’s a different look to everything as if it’s lived a life beyond ours.”

She looked at him with a puzzled stare, “yeah but you could say that about almost everything, anywhere.  The bridge is over eighty years old.  Fort Point is even older than that.”

He looked back at her and threw his arms out in exasperated glee, “and that’s my point!  This entire area has a history.  A life of its own.  It’s beautiful in its age.  You’ve got something from the 30’s in the bridge.  You’ve got the fort from the mid 1800’s.  You’ve got this building here from the 1910’s.”

He pointed up to the Palace of Fine Arts in its near-golden splendor.  The most beautiful building in North America, he often though.  A piece of art that seems as if it was transported there from ancient Greece with its pillars standing tall.

She followed his hand and nodded, “it is a very pretty building.  That’s why I love coming here.  It’s such a serene place.”

“It is!”  He exclaimed.  He often couldn’t hold his excitement when he began talking about something he loved.

“It absolutely is.  The architect was a genius.”

“He was also insane,” she added.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, what?”  His curiosity was high and his focus was solely on her.

“Well you know this place was one of a number of buildings originally constructed, right?”

He shook his head from side to side and she continued.

“Well the architect of it all modeled it after the Roman and Greek ruins of old.  You can tell by looking at it.  He also designed it so it wouldn’t survive much past its initial use of the Panama-Pacific Exposition.  Everything began crumbling and falling apart a few years after it was originally used and many of the other structures were demolished.”

As she spoke she wasn’t making eye contact with him, but instead was looking out on the lagoon.  There were ducks and swans swimming in it.  The eucalyptus trees were hanging and the leaves were swaying in the breeze that came in off of the bay.  She really did love this spot.  Much more than she outwardly let on.

“He used cheap materials.  Nothing that would stand the test of time.  The only reason this building and any of these pillars are still standing is because some people in the city were so enamored with it they formed a group to save it.”

She paused for only a moment before adding, “a famous line attributed to the architect gave the impression that he intended for nothing to be left by the time he was gone.”

“What was it?”  He asked, completely enthralled.

“Every great city needs ruins,” her voice was reminiscent.  Somewhere between her description and the quote she didn’t seem to be talking about the Palace anymore.

“Every great city needs ruins, huh?  That’s kind of romantic if you think about it,” his eyes followed hers out to the lagoon and focused on two ducks swimming along side each other.  He stood next to her and they stared at them together.

“That everything beautiful has something broken inside.  Every great masterpiece has a deep flaw.  And that it doesn’t matter.  There are people that still love it for everything that it is.  They go to it as often as they’re able because it makes them happy.  They don’t even really know why but they know the feeling they get when they’re around it.  And in some ways the ruins make it more beautiful.  The flaws make it more attractive and the people end up loving it because it isn’t perfect.”

There was a silence after he stopped talking.  It was overcast and grey on a Thursday evening with very few people around.  A strong breeze came off of the bay and hugged the ground until it reached them and the cold kiss from the Pacific caused them both to shiver.  She sniffled and rubbed her eyes while turning away from him so he wouldn’t see.  He didn’t pursue her look so she could have that moment.

“Yeah well-,” she didn’t finish her thought.

They watched the ducks for a few more minutes until one flew off around the huge columns, quacking the entire way.

“So maybe he wasn’t crazy.”

“Who?”  She rubbed her eye and turned to him.

“The architect.  Maybe he wasn’t crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because.  I don’t know.  Maybe he was right.”

“About every city needing ruins?”

He nodded, reached out and took her hand, “yeah.   That and maybe he knew all great ruins just needed someone to come along and save them.”

Lisa

There was this girl I used to know, her name was Lisa.  She came to me out of nowhere really. I wrote into a local pen pal exchange and after a few failed attempts at finding a connection I found her, and I think I loved her more purely than anybody I have ever loved.  It wasn’t a trashy, vulgar, sexual hunger type of love where I wanted to rip her clothes off and throw our bodies together. It was an unadulterated love of her personality and the person I believed she was. I was moved enough to start writing for her.  I didn’t realize I was actually writing until she told me how she was in tears while reading it. She was the most elegant muse in that I didn’t realize what she brought forward in me until she told me how much it moved her.

Sometimes We Just Don’t Mix

“I deserve to be loved, don’t I?”  The question was pointed at nobody in particular but seeing as how Henry was the only other one in the room he answered in his Henry-esque way.

“Do you?”

Ugh.  I hate him so much.

“It’s what I’m asking.  Do I deserve love?”  I wasn’t looking at him.  I was looking into a space between spaces.  The place where you go when your mind takes over and you see pictures rolling through the back of your head instead of what your eyes are pointed at.