If you’re lucky enough to not be familiar with my school’s library then allow me to torture/enlighten you. The bottom floor is an all out cesspool of crackling and crinkling candy wrapper children, careless cackling, vocal back flipping and verbal tackling, contagious chaos; a calamitous cacophony of discordant chords calling and crying and singing that proliferate and procreate amorphous choirs of cancerous candor of which only the dog-faced patrons of an institution built on the foundation of self-appointed worth could bare to tolerate for more than a minute at a time. It is without a doubt among my least favorite places in the world and among the places in which I spend the majority of my time. Such is the life of a people-hating people-watcher who gets his masochistic kicks by subjecting himself to the company of those he so condescendingly deems below him.

There are, however, saving graces in such cruel places and in the nature of their faces and grace I wax. In my head they are the good and evil queens of the library but in reality I just spend too much damn time fantasizing and romanticizing all of the girls that I lack the charm and balls to talk to. Here’s an informal introduction to the aforementioned bodacious babes of the book room in which I dwell and have learned to love (presumably a byproduct of Stockholm Syndrome).

Six feet tall. Dear god she’s my height. Who knew they stacked perfect that high. Moonless night-time hair shimmers auburn in the right light; looks just as good in the wrong light. Full blood-stained lips. I’d die to be her next kill. Freckles dance in subtle twinkles like stars on a little nose. Slender as she is sharp, like a snake draped in silk. What a thrill to look at. Eyes penetrate. Hypertension clouds the air. The sludge of fresh hot asphalt crawls through a young mans veins. Melted to my seat. She stands up. The hair on my neck stands up.

Always in the library, never with a book. Always in the coffee shop, never with a drink. Where else must she go only to leave empty handed. Perhaps she suffers from Hopeless-Romantic-Carpel-Tunnel-Syndrome, the outcome of late nights tinder-swiping. Does she dance in clubs under hot white spotlight- noticed by all, approached by none? Fated with perfect genes, doomed to paralyze the meek and maim the confident. The only victims she knows are the ones she’s made and that’s the only thing we have in common.

I’ve only ever seen her flirt once and it was with the boy with the big head and even bigger hats that clearly works out but loves to pretend that he doesn’t. He didn’t seem interested and whether they’re dating or whether or not he was just playing it cool I hate him for exhibiting such cavalier demeanor in a moment during which I would have surely evacuated my insides. She is grace incarnate and while I’m no monster she’s just so effortlessly present and pure that I feel like one anyway. I don’t even know her name but I know her story just by looking. I don’t know what her voice sounds like but I’ve seen her smile enough to convince myself I could make her laugh. There’s a life in her that is so visceral, so palpable and I want to extract it, boil it, and mainline it through my jugular in the moments like this one when I’m home alone thinking about the one that got away-that continues to get away, every time I don’t say what I’m thinking.

And then there is the curious case of the other girl- who might as well be of another world for how intimidating she is.

I see her and I see an island. An island overflowing and oozing with lava from every crack and pore. A fire and heat that consumes and swallows and hardens all foolish and lucky enough to come into contact with its hypnotic allure. A feverous furious flame with a face kind enough to extinguish the burn. She would sooner smother than soothe and her movements are rough and her words are jagged and I am consumed by thoughts of self-destruction, begging to be cut again. Her eyebrows curl like waves that crash down on all of the sandcastle dreams I had about what life was supposed to be like, telling the tale of innocence jaded, and it’s everything I can do to not tear myself open in front of her to prove, without words, that she is simultaneously the best and the worst, the poison and the antidote; the life and the death. She is the end all and be all.

I look at her and see the part of my innards exposed that, day to day, is forced to suppress the urge to scorch the earth as I pass. I long to burn the world down with her at my side, only to serve as her final casualty; a martyr for passion, surrendering to her the last of my breath as she breaks me down in body, chemically on a cellular level, and mind, like a bronco who bucks for freedom, forging rebirth from the embers of my essence, our naked bodies, shackled and trembling, blending into the grey of a planet casted into ash. We fill each other’s lungs and screw in the name of passionate desperation; carnal liberty manifest. I am become she and she is the phoenix through which men are made and shattered. I accept with open arms my penance either by flagellation or fornication.

Day in and day out I am blessed with the effervescent presence of these girls. And day after day I return home unsatisfied. The heart wants what it wants and either finds satisfaction or myocardial infarction. In the temporary Spring during which my soul occassionally furloughs, desire and lust arise elsewhere. Somewhere in The City or Hollywood or Honolulu She glows. I wrote the best shit I’ve ever written about her and only she knows it. We met again for the first time in a long time at a bar in Brooklyn on a Wednesday and I told everyone I knew about it and I even brought her two gifts, only one of which I planned to give her.

Walking in I didn’t care if the night was to be platonic or romantic. I was happy enough to exist in a world where things like her didn’t mind things like me. And even though she’s got Tinseltown digits and red carpet friends and a silver screen smile there’s still a little portion of real estate reserved in my chest for the day she decides that a good laugh, a decent omelet, and a decent set of man-parts are all she needs to feel fulfilled. Until then, I’ll scribble quietly in library corners because, as J. Tillman once said, “it’s never been done before”.