She was the kind of girl who made him wonder who the soldiers really were, the sort of unsung hero who could make lights flicker from lifetimes of darkness. His memory of her was coarse to the touch, a stubborn thing that remained unmoved as he slid up and around the purpled veins of what had become his being. It was as certain as it was inevitable; he needed her the way life needed death. He still remembered that time he tried so hard to break away. He had taken to mass-reading poetry, flash fiction, horror novels, and just about anything else that could take his mind off her for longer than a second. But no matter what he did, no matter how many times or how hard he tried to distract himself, she consumed him. She was a violently beautiful disease to him, and her silhouette rose like an awakening starlit mountain in his dreams. Her voice haunted those regions of his subconscious just as much as her face did; her words had always been especially striking, her pure and unashamed will to live. Most of all, he was drugged helplessly on the memory of her eyes, those dauntless, ruby-skirted globes of vulnerability and unbelievable strength, of the innocence and unspoken hunger she had so carefully locked away. Back then, he became selfish for her. He became selfish for the musty scent of old book and mocha powder she carried with her wherever she went. He became selfish for the feel of her coral lips like apple cores under his, soft and sweet and so very far from the reality his father’s departure had flung over him. Above all, he became selfish for the delicious sound of her churning, smoky, fortified voice in his; he was entangled, body and soul, in the space between her mingling breaths and his, an enchanted slice of the faraway universe that was theirs and theirs alone.

She had grown too tired. The beeps and the shaking fingers and the murmurs that so often separated life from death had suffocated her a step too far, a line too deep. She had been by his side comforting him; there was another operation on the horizon, and he had already begun to revise his will. When his fingers crumpled like limp, overcooked mushroom stems, though, she knew that the time had come. “You’re okay,” she whispered, reaching her fingers to fill the spaces between his. “I’m already there,” he replied, and he looked up at her, his violet eyes soaring to a castle she could never
reach. In that moment he seemed gone, and though she could hear his heartbeat from the monitor, though she was living and alive and so much more than anything he could ever be again, she was so afraid she was choking on her own blood, and though she knew it
was wrong, it was so, so wrong, she marveled for the briefest of moments at the life coursing beneath her fingertips. She would not know when she slid onto a sun-dappled bench in Wayward Park, the five community-grown acres that served as a welcome mat to the hospital. Behind her, two children played war hero on an open patch of grass. Daylight dripped over their makeshift battlefield, lending it an eerie, veiled quality that made her shiver along with the children’s cries. They stabbed her from the inside out, their vitality dulling. Meanwhile, the pungent stench of waffle cones and sweet, dribbling, licked-clean ice cream reeked and slithered its way into her nostrils. She drowned herself in the surrounding hum of the park, a messy slew of snapping birds and cell phone chirps and smudged and lovely emptiness, and in those numbed moments, she became beautiful again.