Oh.
That was his thought when he met her.
She was pretty, for sure. Frazzled, curly bleached blond hair streaked with strawberry, greyish blue eyes that refused to hold his gaze. She wore a looping white T with black squares. A massive scarf coiled around her and made her look fragile.
She had a meandering way of speaking, her thought darted away as often as her eyes did. And she always ended sentences with a tag, undermining all the seriousness of her declarative.
But if you did follower her to the very end, you’d find an exceedingly intelligent, talented, kind, witty, courageous woman.
He didn’t quite know how to process the thought of her.
*
Some of the many things he came to know about her from that point on: that she had a sister but envied the single child; that she alternated between insomnia and hypersomnia; that she had half a liver; that she was a reject of the digerati; that when she started to doodle, that’s how you know you’ve lost her… he could listen to her talk endlessly. Somehow these chance encounters became more to him, and he began to look forward to seeing her.
It was like a silly high school crush. The awkward kid falls one-sidedly for the cool mysterious girl whose shallow imperfections hid her wall-calendar-worthiness. Except they were closer to 30 than to 13, and these kinds of things don’t happen in the real world. Unlikely friendships formed through proximity and necessity fade away and star bound protagonists become nothing than mere acquaintances at best, marginally closer to each other than to the other 1.7 billion people on the planet.
He bore it like the flu and let the delirium set in.
His pupil dilated at the sight of her. The world pulsated beyond his ear drums and became silent. He felts weak and aloft, as if all blood had been drained from his veins and was replaced by sunshine.
He was awash by a force, a thought, a warmth… something. The thing that made this cruel life gentle and infused life into stone-cold hearts. To the pitiful and craven it imbued courage, into the vanquished and downtrodden it endowed the will to defy.
He knew then that for however short awhile, he was love-struck.
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