Please Find This

Note: This hasn't been edited, nothing is final. I just wanted to post it. It starts out in a guy's point of view and switches after the long dotted line to the girl's, just so you are aware.

These aren't my words. These are someone else's words that I strung together to form new ones. I took their meaning and I made my own meaning. The majority is taken from pleasefindthis.blogspot.com. I have felt and I have been inspired. I hope you are, too.

And her shape and her hair and her eyes and her smell and her voice.

That suddenly, these things can exist and I'm not quite sure how they existed without me knowing about them before.

She moved from the door, to the register. Her steps were purposeful. They were smooth yet harsh on the floor in her heels. Her heels were high, and the boots they belonged to reached higher than any boots I had ever seen. Her dress was retro, short and bright, belted but not restricted in its volume. Her brown hair was long and flowing, unruly and wavy, tossed to the side and swept off her open face. Her eyes -- God, her eyes -- were large and dark with unidentifiable emotions backstroking through them, ignoring everything else.

She pulled out a chair by the window, facing me, and sat down. She reached into her bag and pulled out her laptop, opened it and powered it up.

Her order was called.

She stood and walked to the counter to get her drink. I heard a soft, "Thank you," as she moved her lips.

She walked back to her seat and continued typing on her laptop.

I stood to leave. Instead of my feet taking me to the door and to my car, they walked me to her.

I moved my lips and tongue and breathed and the sounds were made. "Hi, I'm Jackson."

She looked up. "Hi. I'm Molly."

...

"There is still a door in you. Boarded up, covered in chains and nails. Paper stuffed in the locks."

She looked at me, her eyes still swimming with emotion.

I had known Molly for a year. I still hadn't known much about her past. "It doesn't matter," she would tell me whenever I asked.

That made me so angry. "Don't you dare tell me nothing matters. Everything matters. Every fucking drop of rain, every ray of sunlight, every wisp of cloud matters and they matter because I can see them and if I can see them, then they can see me and I know that there's an entire world that cares out there, hiding behind a world that doesn't, afraid to show who it really is and with or without you, I will drag that world out of the dirt and the blood and the muck until we live in it. Until we all live in it." I was standing by the end, pointing to the ground and shouting. I was shouting at her.

She was looking out the window, her brow furrowed and her unruly hair had fallen into her face. She was quiet but she cried.

I breathed heavily and went home.

...

Her boyfriend of four years died about two months before I met her. She told me that she was still recovering. She said she knew that she would be better someday. She said it was taking a lot longer than she planned.

...

"It's hard to speak."

She looked at me, the wind blowing in her hair. She breathed in the wind and the scent of grass and flowers. She blinked slowly and looked at me, breathing in the earth.

I said to her, "You and I could collide, like atoms in some scientist's wet dream. We could start a new universe together. We could mix like a disease. And if we do, I hope we never get better."

She pushed her self off her hands and leaned over to me, pressing her lips to mine. Her chapstick made her lips stick to mine, making them glide together. She pulled away faster than I wanted her to, and she looked at me again, staying silent.

I decided I should talk again. "I'm serious about this. I am serious about you. I want this. I want it."

She looked away from my face and leaned back onto her hands again. She turned her face up to the dark sky and to the moon that cut through its grayed color. "The sky is so clear that, sometimes, at night, you can see the far blue edge of forever behind distant suns. Yet, nothing's that clear here, and I'm sitting right next to you."

I looked at her. What wasn't clear? It was so clear. It was like looking through paned glass. It was like looking through the air that surrounded us.

But I stayed silent and looked away.

...

"I know that all I have to do is move my lips and tongue and breathe out, but it's still hard to say it. I love you."

She winced and furrowed her brow, and looked down onto the blanket. We were in the same field as the night before. We went there every day. And every day, I looked at her, and thought the same things.

She didn't respond, so I kept going. "When I sit near you, my hands suddenly become alien things and I don't know where to put them or what they usually do, like this is the first time I've ever had hands and maybe they go in my pockets and maybe they don't."

She stayed quiet, and breathed in the new wind and air that came out of the grass, flowers and trees. She opened her mouth and closed it. She looked to me and said, "I don't think it's a good idea. I'm still stuck in what I felt when I met you. I'm sorry."

I went home.

.......................................

His house was dark, even for being the late afternoon. The sky was just starting to loose its sun, the night light starting to grow stronger, yet still barely illuminating the earth.

He sat in the darkness of his living room, a glass of water on the table beside him, and I wondered if it was new or old until he picked it up, pressing the glass to his lips and tilting his head back.

"Jack?"

He set the glass of water down and looked at me. The small amount of light that managed to spill in from the curtained windows illuminated his eyes and reflected its shape onto his irises and pupils that must have been opened wide, straining to see in the semi-darkness, like my own. In this moment, it was okay that he couldn't see color, for the darkness grayed it all anyway. But that didn't mean it wasn't beautiful.

"Jack," I said again. I sat on the ottoman in front of the chair he was in.

"How do you expect me to just carry on like my heart wasn't torn out."
"Jack-"

"Did you think I told you it to be romantic? Standing in public spaces and airing my heart out, oxygen in the blood and all that ever was. I'm not telling you to be romantic. I'm telling you because it's the truth, and we told each other we wanted to tell each other what was real, no matter what. I told you it because it was fucking necessary."

"Oh, shut up," I told him. I could see him sit back in the darkness. "Every time it rains, it stops raining. Every time you hurt, you heal. After darkness, there is always light and you get reminded of this every morning but still you choose to believe that the night will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good or the bad. So you might as well smile while you're here."

He was quiet, his mouth open, his eyes wide. He furrowed his brow and looked to his lap. "So what happens?" he finally asked.

"Nothing happens," I told him. What was he expecting? For me to have fallen in love with him in the three days we didn't speak? For me to cup his face and kiss his lips and tell him I loved him and couldn't breathe a single breath without knowing we would be together forever?

"Nothing," he repeated.
"I'm moving. I told you I was going to move. To New York. Remember?"

"I remember," is what he said. He leaned forward and rested his face in his hands. He stayed quiet for another minute or so, and I felt the silence pressing against my ears. It was so loud, I felt as if my ears would bleed. "So, if you can't stay, walk away slowly. Rip the plaster off bit by bit, piece by piece. Because I'd rather feel that than nothing at all."

"I have become someone else through all of this. Through meeting you. I am not the same person I was before. I miss the person I was before everything happened. I miss the Molly I was before the man I loved died in that car accident. Can you honestly say you're the same person you were before you met me?"

He looked at me. "No."

"Maybe we should blame that third person we became, that personality we shared together. Maybe it's their fault, because you're a good person and I think I'm a good person, too. We just weren't made for this."

He nodded his head and looked away. I took his face in my hands and kissed his forehead. He looked me in the eye, my hands still on his unshaven jaw. He said, "You're right. You're completely right."

I went home.

Photo credit: Gwen Finneran.