The way her ethereal blonde hair caressed her sculpted cheekbones left a burning sensation in my lungs; that fire has not escaped me since the day we had first met. I never envisioned myself losing my mind over a girl who carried around a floral phone case, or who chased away the summer with her layers upon layers of maroon cardigans, yet there I was: entranced by the dull glow of the ring on her middle finger instead of researching pictures regarding the American Dream. Lost amidst the fine line between hopeless romanticism and intellectual contemplation, I asked myself why I should look up a dream when she sat right next to me, radiating a restless hope for the future while her heavy shoulders balanced the weight of the world. She made suffering seem noble, as if coping with daily burdens were second nature to her.

I often wished that I, myself, could dance through life as gently as she did. There was almost a diaphanous quality to her, a dainty composure in the way she slumped her neck when focusing or threw her head back while laughing at my jokes. At times when the world appeared too harsh, she allowed herself to sink into the background, becoming another person in the crowd who drowned out noise with inner silence. The uneducated viewer would’ve mistaken her taciturn nature for introversion, yet I knew better.

She possessed an infectious love for the people around her, clinging onto the last sliver of good she saw in anyone and building their persona around a fantasy. When she cared about you, she gleamed, and you gleamed in her eyes because of it. Even then, in Language Arts while her hands were white from her concentrated grip and her eyes were glued to an article as she tried her best to ignore me, I could still feel myself gleam. The CLC seemed like an unlikely setting for romantic endeavors, but I would sit there quietly until our classmates decomposed; especially if it meant I could be next to her forever, feeling the warmth she saw in me.

Most days in class, however, her body was merely a placeholder in a seat. As I interchanged my opinions on Martin Luther King’s dreamy imagery with Mrs. Powell, she was off having dreams of her own. There was a sense of emptiness from her distant blue eyes that one couldn’t define; she existed in an indeterminate area in time and space, and most days it terrified her. This gaze she held was not hollow; she was not a victim of the present. She carried a certain sadness that made her eyes drop and matted her hair down, yet there was no bitterness within her. The brief moments where she’d snap back into reality possessed an unquantifiable vitality, which made me feel like all of my jarred up pieces could fall back together. She understood dreams better than anyone else because she knew how to live one; she knew what it meant to be alive because she spent most of her time as a ghost.

We were both ghosts, in a sense, but never the kind that would exist on the same wavelength. I was not gentle and I could not tread lightly. I had the wrath to shake skyscrapers from their foundations while she had the patience to know better. Yes, I was a ghost, but I was groundbreaking, plate-shattering, television static and she was the silence that spoke louder than my screams ever could.

…

I considered myself lucky to be one of the few people who really knew her. Yes, I knew what she presented to teachers and friends and family. I knew the roles she played. I familiarized myself with the quiet student and the supportive hand and the loving older sister, but what I longed for most was the form she took when I was the singular audience.

That day she was the artist. Her thin yet powerful fingers were the saviors of a quivering paintbrush as she envisioned an effortless masterpiece on my back. Her gentle and calculated strokes stitched me together with the precision of placing stars in the sky. No one was going to skin me alive and take her work to a museum, yet there was a more complex story in a single drop of her yellow paint than in anything Picasso ever created. I was no Weeping Woman and she never intended to make it so. She never needed the element of sadness to construct a convincing story, because every moment we spent together spun a plot of its own. This was it. She was the type of muse the greatest creators could only dream of, for she existed in two separate states. We were both artists, but she was one of the few people who was a work in itself. They say you can’t touch museum art, yet the word “rebirth” etched into me when I felt her palm trace my shoulder blades, or when I saw how excited she was about showing me her final work. This was something I could never let go of.

There was a surrealistic, dreamlike element about the tie-dye spirals she constructed on my skin, and all I wanted was more time to express the fondness I felt towards her. I talked about how brilliant she was, about how she could paint me to make me gleam on the outside too, but the received response was a head shake and a smirk. Despite this brilliance I spoke of, I suppose all intellect goes hand in hand with some level of stupidity. The dreamer, the ghost, the art, and the artist failed at one thing: seeing the person behind it all. This girl never appreciated herself for who she really was, which I suppose is why I constantly had to double my affection.

When she was in my arms, though, the technicalities of that rendered meaningless. The insecurities and the zoning out and the passive nature of our endeavors didn’t matter, because in that moment we were eating hazelnut ice cream and watching Bo Burnham’s comedy show, “Make Happy," and the world was at a standstill. She was with me. I didn’t care about how much I hated where I was in my life a few hours ago and I hoped she didn’t either. As the show was ending, the final lines “are you happy?” rung rhythmically in my ears. My life was permeated by a constant sense of doubt; a vague uncertainty about most questions that kept me up at night. Yet it was then that I knew the answer to that certain one:

I was happy.