Dedicated to Glista for being fantastic <3
Thirty: Candy Apple Red.
“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in.”
-Anais Nin
I think you really start to know a person, to understand them, when you people-watch with them; when you sit with them on a bus stop bench in the rain and quietly observe the world as it blurs past; when they are the only thing to stop you from drowning in a sea of muted colors and spinning sound.
I like to think that I knew you before that gloomy Sunday, but I think that was the day that you actually began to make sense, that the contents of your mind were willingly spilled into my hands. At the very least, it helped to pry my eyes open just a little bit further in regards to who you really were.
It was sprinkling outside, but the awning over the bench kept us dry. People hurried by all around, umbrellas unfurled, and took no notice of the girl and boy sitting there and watching them all.
“Look at that guy over there,” I remarked, flicking a finger across the street. You looked up, narrowed your eyes—blinked twice as you caught sight of the young man, dressed entirely in firetruck red and standing on a skateboard with a boombox balanced on his shoulder. As the light changed, he glided across the street, taking no notice as he coasted through a puddle and sprayed an army of sensible-shoe tourists.
“Oh my,” you said, as he disappeared down the block. That was all, but then there was the flurry of wind-stricken pages, the scratch of ballpoint against the notebook in your lap.
“We'll call him Eric,” you told me.
This was how you watched people; you stood aside and let them pass, but froze them momentarily with your pen, captured them in the span of a heartbeat with words on paper. It was, you explained, the way you developed all your characters.
I watched too, helping where I could, but for a lot of the time I studied you out of the corner of my eye. I watched your hair, waves of russet brushstrokes in the air. Your cheeks pink with the cold, your green eyes bright and ringed with makeup. Your lips, candy apple red, pursed in concentration. You were bright and colorful, a peony painted onto the gray afternoon. You were dazzling.
Our tea, to go, sat in paper cups beside us, losing steam with every heartbeat. Occasionally you'd pause, take a sip, and leave a smile for me. Then you'd turn, back to being a silent watcher.
“Look there,” you'd say every now and then, pointing to that little girl in pink high heels chasing after her mother, or that tall man with the umbrella who ran into a streetlamp while looking down at his phone. There are characters everywhere, you told me. Just waiting, waiting for someone to find them.
You were bright-eyed when you finally took a break, your scarlet lips knit into a smile. I pulled my camera from my pocket and snapped your picture as you briefly closed your eyes. I was getting a lot of use out of the thing, it's just that nearly every photograph I took was of you.
I watched the captured moment slip out of the camera, and fingered the glossy paper for a moment before sliding it into the notebook with all the others. It was the notebook you'd given me, my Christmas gift, and I'd taken to carrying it everywhere, so that I'd always have a story at my fingertips and because it reminded me so much of you.
You yawned softly, then sighed, your loose bun teetering atop your head. Then you leaned over and kissed me, for no reason except because you could, and wanted to, and no one was going to stop you.
