His fingertips were covered in cigarette burns and scars he got from breaking glass bottles. His teeth were yellow from the smoke that he blew past them, but his jaw was strong and his eyes smiled after midnight. I thought he was stunning, like abstract art woven with darkness. The other girls whispered about his drug habit and how bad his leather jacket always smelled; like cigarettes and old spice. Yet somehow the other girls liked to flirt when he came around. They giggled and twirled their hair and got red lipstick all over the end of his cigarettes even though they didn’t smoke. He played along but he was too good for them and their pretty dresses and cheap smiles.

His eyes were elixir of the sweetest type. He would look at me for a moment and the indifference in them would send me flying. The buzz was better than any marijuana I’d ever smoked. His lips were soft in contrast to the hard lines of his face. He tasted like black coffee and jazz flavored cigars, and sometimes he liked to kiss me just to prove that he could. He always pulled my hair and bit my lip then left me lonely with hand shaped bruises on my hips and brick-wall battle scars covering my back. I was in love with the essence of him.

He looked like trouble but felt like lavender smelled. No one ever knew what I meant by that until I brought them home and lit up incense that filled the room with purple tendrils of smoke and the smell of a home they could never have. I was eve and he was the forbidden fruit and the serpent all wrapped into one irresistible opportunity to flee from the light path. I’d long strayed from the garden and gotten lost in the fog created by the whiskey on his breath. Each step I took sunk me deeper into emotional quicksand and the moon that controlled the tides of my desire was the same blue as his eyes.

Sometimes I listened to him talk for hours. I was his loom and every word he said was a strand of yarn that wrapped around me to weave a beautiful picture of the moments that I could never spend with him. He told me about living and about death. He was sad in all the ways that I wanted to be but could never mimic, and it spoke to the pieces of me that would never develop to be anything beautiful. He mourned people he never knew. When I asked him why he told me it wasn’t the reality of the death that rattled him, but rather the absence of life. It was poetry, and it shook me.

I admired the way he refused reality. It was like he was one step in front of it just floating in the echoes of the future. No rules bound him. Not human rules and not those of time. He was free like I had never seen anyone be before him. It was nothing if not mystifying, perplexing. I wanted so much to float beside him, but he was far too high and my mind was too grounded.

If I could paint he would have been my only subject, but I wouldn’t have drawn his features; I would’ve drawn his soul. When I was a child I used to try and create new colors and I always ended up with grey. His soul was grey. He wasn’t bad but he wasn’t good, and his heart was in a place between right and wrong. He was as many shades of grey as a cloud of smoke and I wanted to evaporate with him into the atmosphere. 

He faded sometimes. So lost in his own mind that he was nothing but a ghost sitting beside me and stopping the record player during the best part of songs he hadn’t wanted to listen to in the first place. He nodded along with the silence and sat still while the music played. I laid beside him and stroked his hair until he finally looked down at me and blinked in surprise. Sometimes it was like he hadn’t noticed I was there until that very moment, but in that moment he truly saw me.

It was days like that when he told me about myself. He told me how afraid I was of being nothing but average. Nothing but another girl who worried about things only girls could think to care about. He would whisper that I wanted to be special but I was stuck in my own mind that was so black that I got lost in my memories. He never told me that I was beautiful, or that I meant something to him or anyone else. He didn’t aim to romance me, but to let me know how caught up I was in the dream of being extraordinary. It came out harsh and would’ve sounded like an insult to anyone else’s ears, but he was right and I couldn’t find myself to be angry at him for it.

He studied me like an artist would his subject even though he’d never held a paintbrush in his life. He picked out my flaws and my softer edges, and ran his hands over them just to prove that they were there. It was intimate in ways that made me feel more naked than when I was without clothes, and he thought nothing of it. I was just a person to him. Someone he met along the way to death, and there was no guarantee that I would stay, but no expiration date on my presence.

He would think of me when I was gone, but not of my stories or the way my lips felt pressed to his neck. He might think of the way my nose was shaped, or how my fingers twitched when I was sleeping. Not because he missed me, but because he met someone else who shared my habits. Someone similar who was just as normal as I; maybe someone who had never thought of being extraordinary.

He was something like nostalgia, but for the future not the past. I thought about it and he wasn’t there, and it left an emptiness in my chest. He never would have thought about a future with me. He never thought about the future in general. The present fueled him. He fulfilled every whim and every desire without thinking twice about it, or sitting down to dwell on whether it was a mistake or an achievement. For me he was both. I was so different from him; so tangible, and so real. That is why I couldn’t keep him. There is no holding someone who was never meant to exist.