A woman I loved (not this one) said to me once, “You give all the wrong people second chances and sometimes don’t even finish giving the right ones a first.” Granted, this relationship was doomed from the start for a number of reasons, not least of which was simply abysmal timing, but this girl was one of those people I should have invited into my life much more wholeheartedly, and for much, much longer. But I was young, dumb, and trying to reassemble a life that was still falling apart: It was years until I got my head around just how exceptional she actually was and probably still is.
Ten sentences: No more or less.
She takes these tiny sighs at the end of almost every sentence, as if existence at her amperage is exhaustingly intense, which may be the reality: Her every sentence is a run-on with no space for punctuation because she’s got too much to give—so when she settles into those breaths with a sound almost like a purr it is because they are a necessity, for her and everyone, seconds of respite taken for safety’s sake, lest her glowing circuit overload, and brilliant blue flames burst from her eyes. She speaks so fast it sometimes takes me a minute or more to process her comments, so to take her all in, I must be silent; my time with her turns me into The Quiet Type, the kind of guy I always wanted to be—mortified frequently beyond belief by my own idiocy, I have all my life longed for someone to shut me up, to render me mute, thus rarely embarrassed—and so I watch her like a movie. She is ball lightning—beautiful, terrifying, ineffable—and I have never experienced anything quite like her: breakfast is laughing, sex is laughing, even wiping snow from the windshield is somehow laughing; she is unsullied, unlike the drug buddies with whom I’ve hung my hat for the last thousand days, and it is a lovely struggle trying to keep up with her—we ended up together almost by accident, but when I am with her, for the first time in the longest time, I am chasing life instead of death.
I never directly mentioned the summertime suicide attempt, but I told her about the overdose, the self-loathing, the crippling inability to really feel anything; I alluded to the abuse in the bedrooms and schools of my youth (but quit before getting to grisly specifics); she knew about my damaged heart (literal, figurative); and in the dark, in bed, I’d shared the tales of my Dying Mother, and the Deadbeat Dad who fled from me, claiming hatred for babies, but then took in two strays, fat Chilean babies who might round out a proper family.
We were coming back from a dismal dinner in a hideous building where we’d been visiting a favorite waitress when she said it—I remember the color of the December sky (neon navy blue), the metronomic clicking of my turn signal (we were heading left), even the song on the stereo on which I’d dropped the volume so I might listen to her (“In the Shadow of the Valley of Death”); I remember the warmth of her fingers, which had just clutched a coffee cup but now stuck out of rust-colored fingerless gloves, as she took my hand from the gearshift and squeezed it—”I think it’s amazing that you’re so over everything, all of that bullshit, I think you’re amazing because you’ve been able to move on.”
After the left was a wide curve right, and on the highway drive home, I did not let go of her hand—not even to smoke—because I hadn’t let go of anything else, nothing at all; I was frightened, so frightened, and “over” nothing, but somehow she thought I was strong; somehow she was unaware that she’d arrived in the nick of time and had been slowly saving me: When she let loose those tiny sighs, I sucked that vented energy eagerly into my lungs, and as such, she had for a month been resuscitating a nearly dead man. At the end of every day we spent together, she’d slip with me under the heavy covers, enlace her legs with mine, secret her icy feet between my ankles and knees, settle her head upon my chest and take a final sigh: gigantic, preparatory, so deep it relaxed me—I had never seen someone settle into sleep so satisfiedly; my hands in her thick blonde hair, she would take the night’s final sigh, and I was every time reminded of a lioness, content and well-fed, stronger than the men in her pride and ready for rest in the cooler shadows of the sweltering Serengeti.
I doubt she ever connected the events, but the next morning, I stayed late in bed, strangely awake (though I’d later claim a power outage and oversleep), missing about an hour of work, and wearing her like a blanket; with the exception of seconds spent walking stairs, brushing teeth, or peeing, I hadn’t stopped touching her since she said I was strong: the previous evening, rubbing her shoulders, hugging her, touching her breasts, holding her hands as she slept, I’d been using my wiry arms like jumper cables, hoping to borrow some of her unbridled energy for myself to fortify, to edify, to try to prove her right. In the ugly afternoon—wimpy, silver sunlight perfunctorily punctured the slate grey sky and ragged black-capped tors of filthy snow melted on roadsides—I drove us both home, still dwelling on her sentiments, and making plans to become a better man for her, someone who seemed to have a soul, someone strong as she thought me to be; silently admiring her as she explained her day, I reached slowly to hold one of her hands (a gesture somewhat unlike me), but retreated when I found her occupied by fiddling with a pot of glitter which slipped from her grip as the car came to a halt, its plastic cap cracked and, open, it caromed off the dash; kept suspended by eddies of recirculating air, the cab of my car was a shimmering cloud of silver, pink, periwinkle, and spring green—the frozen explosion of a Roman candle, as if she, that laughing force of nature full of raw potential and energy, had finally, in fact, overloaded. Stunned, as everything settled, I looked in her eyes (candlewick blue) as, guiltily, she said, “Oops,” and though I would eventually, inevitably do her wrong, I loved her so intensely at that moment that I would have followed her into Hell, anywhere.
