Je t'aime.

She described to me the hill she had to climb upwards, on her commute home. The phone felt cold in my hand, but I knew it was because of what was being shared. She had lost her interest in people, just as she had lost her faith. It was nothing at all surprising. I knew how they stripped her of color. I could see it in the way love was shared. Everything was about exploratory fingers. Nothing was about the soul and the mentality of wanting to be close and near. 

“If people are gonna fuck with me, when then the hell with them too!”

This was her new way of moving bravely on. It all hung heavy in the air and there was that naughty moment when she said all she wanted was, “Acid and Fireworks”. That and to get home quickly. She had been walking from work, where she was a cashier girl at a neighborhood grocery store. I remembered shopping with her there once. She had schooled me on the different types of cheese they had. “Yeah, so when I’m all rich and shit, I’m just gonna drop money on bricks of cheddar. Because you know, that’s all that’s important.” 

Her life was all kinds of awful and she was sleeping on people’s couches. I had no concept of this until later, and was only familiar with the attic of my parent’s shack, which was at the same time, just as depressive. Her daily intake consisted of ramen noodles and boxes of fruity pebbles. After offering to help her with finances, she shrugged this off repeatedly and laughed. “No, no, no”, she clucked well. “I think this will all be a great learning experience. But then again, who knows? I’ve always made for a horrible optimist.” 

Later that day, I was asked to go sailing with my father. I resisted this outing and instead brought to life a song of childlike intervention. It spoke well to the soul, but didn’t amaze anyone on the beach, like I wanted it to. This was actually my new way of critiquing myself. I’d sit at the park and pull into soft hymn and wait for some sort of reaction. If all I received was tiny blankets of normalcy, I’d pull off and leave to go be alone some more. I’d always end up calling that boy who sent me to bed with the fever too. This time I called, he was making a salad and mentioned the name of a Bob Dylan album that I can’t fully remember now. This was followed by some sort of reasoning as to why all his poems suck, as well as his frequent appreciation for foods like peanut butter and spinach. His voice was something deep, but genuine.

I thought this was all enlightening at the time and saw dark parts of my soul in the details that sat readily as something mundane. I never talked to him the way that I felt like I could though. I talked to him the most in fact, in bed at night. Except these conversations were imaginary ones that I’d rehearse well, causing me to play with the same words repeatedly. In fact, this once revealed some scattered side-story about faeries, dragons, and mystic trees of bamboo. It was decided intrinsically that the main faerie Daphne, liked the taste of cotton candy. The real crazy part though, was as soon as my mind formed the word “cotton candy” in the mystic web of the subconscious, across the street in real-time, the same word fell out the mouth of a seven year old, riding his bike in the church parking lot by my parent’s house. 

He said it repeatedly, as if possessed by some higher form of spiritual energy, and I connected this immediately with all of life’s greatest miracles. It was coincidences like this that happened sporadically in a beautifully divine sort of way. It was a whispered connection that made sense in the moment.