Creative writing take #2
She wore pink and black latex and her platinum hair like a modern day Marilyn Monroe, dripping seduction and availability before the camera, unfurling into introversion away from its gaze. In those moments I only ever wanted to crawl inside her and wrap her shy and fragile whimsy around my shoulders; hold her in my hands like a tiny bird.
It sounds stupid, but I would have washed her feet with my hair. It sounds stupid, but I would have done anything to be a feather in her pillow or a stroke of her pen or a tear in her sock.
School days saw her with pulled back hair and knee-high clean white socks. Always her dark blue eyes contemplating from beneath a blonde fringe, eyes that had seen too much, too young. There is a photo I found of her from when she was four or five, with cousins happily smiling to the camera. But her wide, wild eyes, they gaze upwards for approval, a little bird looking for the consent to fly.
She said she liked Marilyn Manson because he’s shy. She’s a clone for Barbie but she’d rather be Ken.
What was crazy to me wasn’t that I would get that can’t breathe, heart beating too fast feeling again this soon, it was that I could get that feeling again at all.
For months I hungered to learn how many scars she had and to memorise the texture of her tongue.
She called me one night after a party. We’d both been loosened by alcohol and I felt and said things I may not have under other circumstances. I couldn’t get over the sound of her voice: a child in the sunshine, Catwoman’s claws dipped in honey, the burnt outer layer of a toasted marshmallow.
She was everything a teenage boy was supposed to want, with her hourglass figure and full lips. But that wasn’t what attracted me to her. She had a sparkle that had been dulled, and sometimes it felt like only I could see it.
I once wrote a song for her, clumsily strumming my sister’s old guitar and scribbling half-formed lyrics into a notebook. I titled it Five Fold Kiss. The way she looked at me, the way she talked to me, the way I sat when I thought about her: every moment was a five fold kiss.
What was crazy to me wasn’t that I could love her, but that I could love again at all.