This is how you lose her …

Trouble and triumph

She is so used to making mistakes and fucking up her life that the day she meets him, she hardly even acknowledges that he has noticed her.  Hardly responds when he addresses her and she doesn’t even realize that she’s discarding his best lines like he’s bringing out the trash.  And when she walks away, unaffected, he’s smitten.

“Excuse me, Ma’am?”  he brushes a finger lightly across her upper arm.

The voices inside her head are louder than a stadium filled with 10,000. Her senses, overloaded.  She barely feels his touch.  She can’t.  She has no room for this man’s song.  No room for his blue eyes.

She turns back towards him, for just a second, looks right through him, then continues on, propelled forward, down a road she insists on traveling alone.

Where did my life go wrong?

He is left standing there on the pathway.  His head tilted to the side.  Absorbing every detail of her as she quickly shuffles away.  Almond eyes.  Pretty dress.  Soft shoes.

Sometime later, when he sees her again, because you know he has to, their reunion doesn’t go exactly the way he had imagined.  She still wont see him.  She doesn’t see anybody around her.  She’s existing in some other space and time.  Celestial.  And beautiful.  And he has to have her, so he follows her.  Finds out where she lives and makes an attempt to court her.  He’ll coax her back down from the rooftops with his masculinity.  If that doesn’t work, he might beg.

On Tuesday he sends a little something to her doorstep. A gift intended to make her smile. An anonymous bouquet of flowers.  Not roses.  Too typical.  Peonies.  Too Hollywood.  He chooses sunflowers.  Tall but neatly clipped.  Sunshine for a girl lost on the moon.

And what becomes of those flowers?  They die on her front porch.  Wilted down and drooping over the sides of a tall glass vase.  Unappreciated and uncollected.  Mocking him as he drives by her house that next Saturday. Their promise all dried out.

He takes it in stride.  Maybe anonymous was weird. This is 2016 and she lives in this city.  He should have known better.  Undeterred, he tries again.  Signs his name this time, unlike the last.  But still, she remains indifferent to his advances.  She wont receive a parcel from him. Wont sign for his gifts.  Wont acknowledge his gestures.

These gifts couldn’t possibly be for me.

He tries to maintain his dignity but she’s driving him freaking mad.  He’s too curious.  Too wistful.  Wanting for far too much.  He’s resentful. Insulted.  His ego is bruised.

Fuck her then.

Let the boxes pile up! 

Let the bees swarm!

Predators and creators…The locust and the bee.

But this girl has a philosophy about bees: the less attention that is paid to a sting, the less painful it is.

Sometime later, when he’s all but gone mad with desire, she opens her eyes and takes a good look around her.  She sees colors.  Bright colors all around her.  And inside, she feels alive.  A spring awakening. It scares the ever living shit out of her.

Fuck off!  

She needs to remain invisible. And he keeps exposing her.  Making her look up from her feet, forcing her to stumble on her path.  She has to feel alive now.  She is alive again. She can’t help but listen for the doorbell. Wonder what treat awaits her on the other side.  It has been so long since she let her eyes linger on the fine petal of a purple flower.  She’s feeling wistful, and though however foreign this feeling of rebirth might be, she can’t help but admit it’s delightful.  And she hates him for it.

Go back to Mars! There is nothing to see here!  I am nothing, to see.

He has no idea what he’s doing to her.  He thinks there is nothing to this but she’s starting to unravel.  He isn’t lighting her doorway but she’s looking out for him.  Time has come and gone and he’s moved on but she’s still here.

She’s still here.