I used to write to her. They were songs about stars and the midnight moon. Sometimes she was cast a spectral beauty, the shade of a Renaissance painting, the perpetually adolescent vampire queen (we were both Anne Rice fans those days). Those stories were invariably about her and her boyfriend. She thought I was mocking her teenage romantic angst, and retaliated by dismantling my overwrought prose with biting literary criticism. She found the exchanges funny, and I wondered if she knew that it was me, writing to her. Or perhaps she did, and laughter was the only reaction she thought wouldn’t hurt me.
I was in love. But it wasn’t her I loved. No, it was the idea of her, of everything that she was and I was not. She was kind. She was sweet. She was smart. She was witty. She was funny. She was radiant. She had a family that loved each other. They lived in a large house and had cats with Shakespearean names. They sat around the patio table overlooking a waning sun, the warm Mediterranean breeze ruffled the curtains. She liked to curl up lazily in her chair and listen her folks bustled about around as her doze off to her English homework.
She had everything I wanted. When she spoke to me, a warmer, gentler, hopeful life beckoned. I was drawn to her, clumsily and from a distance, a shy little helianthus.
~ Happy Birthday to you, L.
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