I am trying to write a story about her, but for some reason I cannot describe her. Her face was roundish? But maybe a little long in the chin? Front teeth were a little larger than normal, so that, when I was in a whimsical mood, I would sometimes think about how she reminded me a little bit of a rabbit. Her breasts were small, her hips narrow (is it crass to make these observations, to discuss her female features? It makes me uncomfortable, to be honest. I suppose it's something I ought to get over, but at the same time I feel like, even by thinking about it, I'm sexualizing her. Or am I just being an honest writer?). She was actually kind of boyish – not overly so, not so much that anyone would confuse her for one, and it wasn't that she wasn't attractive, but at the same time she could never be mistaken for one of those models, all sexual energy and curves and clothes to set said curves off. Which is actually something I really liked about her.
But however I feel, the prose refuses to come. Words flow, I suppose, but I can't seem to really pick out many specific details, and none relevant to the story I'm working on. Does she have a mole? Are her ears shapely? What about her hair? So I go on Facebook, looking for a picture of her, hoping that they will somehow jar something, knock something free, remind me of some small memory that I have let become overgrown with moss and time, hoping that it will unexplainably make this dearth of words flow again. It's a little stalkery, I admit freely to myself, but whatever. I'm attempting to write a twelve story series about her, so if objections or protestations of obsession were to be made, they probably should have been addressed some time ago.
The first picture on her facebook is actually a picture of her and her (relatively) new boyfriend. There's no bitterness in this. I'd be surprised about that, except that there hasn't been any bitterness for some time now. There's only a sort of aching sadness at the back of my chest. In the picture, he's okay looking, and he's put his arm around her, and she's leaning into him and they look like every other picture of every other couple that has had a quick snapshot taken of them in a restaurant. I don't care about him. It's been four years since we broke up – almost half a decade. More than a sixth of my entire life. Time has closed that wound. Closed and scarred over long ago. No, what makes me ache is that she's grown so well. She's such an adult now. Her hair is long again – she'd been wearing it short for over a year when we'd broken up – and she wears those fine-rimmed librarian glasses that, against all odds, make her look less severe even though that shouldn't be the case. She's got on this grown-up flower-print dress, the likes of which I've never seen on her before in my life. Dark blue with flowers, it is neither too formal nor too informal; neither a prom dress or a sundress. It's just the kind of dress an adult woman would wear on a casual day-to-day basis when she wants to know she looks good.
And as the descriptions wax to stalker-like proportions, I should take a moment to explain that it isn't so much what she's wearing as how she's wearing it. Or I suppose it is what she's wearing, but not in the sense that I care what her dress looks like or her necklace or her earrings. More that the dress she wears is so grown up, that the necklace she's wearing is real jewelry, that the earrings are ones the girl I knew wouldn't really have wanted to wear. She's an adult now. She's grown up and grown into herself. And the tragedy I find is not that I lost the girlfriend, but that I lost the girl. I didn't grow up alongside her. For that matter, I barely grew up. I'm wearing the same style of clothes that I wore then. I'm a little bit fatter. I'm a little bit hairier. It's not much of an improvement, to be honest.
But god, has she improved. And what I'm trying to say here is that I do not necessarily like the improvements better. I don't dislike them either. But it would have been fun to see them occur, and now I don't get that chance. It's sort of a bummer when you stop to think about it.
But hey, I shouldn't get hung up about this. This project, after all, is about exploring the past, like a dentist with probes and picks and a little mirror on a stick; to examine it and light up the parts that I hadn't quite ever looked at clearly before. It isn't about the her of now – it isn't even really about her – and it isn't about what I did right or wrong with her, and though I may look at the moment I lost her it isn't about how I lost her. Instead, there was a girl with half-lidded eyes, and glasses, and little buckteeth, and for a time we were happy together, and more than anything else this project is me trying to explore that happiness. Partly because I want to show up that guy who wrote the book that inspired this. And partly because I want to pin these memories down like a snowflake in a box. But mostly because it's something to write about, and be honest and sincere about, and it's something I don't have to make up, something that I can simply hold up to the light and squint at and record, and try to find the meaning in it.
It's after midnight and I haven't actually written a word of the story I set out to work on tonight, and it has just begin to gently rain outside my window. And she's gone from my life, and that is, distressingly, okay. So this is me getting the woman out of my system and trying to remember the girl. So I can write my story of her, as well as I can remember. Because that story is all that's left that I want.
Write
Write
Write
Write
Right.
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