these shoes were meant for dancing not for running away
ICE
Part 1
She came that night like every girl's worst fear; dazzling frost star ice queen. Tall and with that long silver blond hair and a flawless face, a perfect body in white crushed velvet and a diamond snowflake tiara. The boys and girls parted to let her through - they had instantaneously given up on him when they saw her. I felt almost - relieved. Like that first night with him but different. Relieved because what i dreaded most in the whole world was going to happen and I wouldn't have to live with it anymore - the fear. There is relief of finally not being alone and the relief of being alone when no one can take anything away from you. Here she was, my beautiful fear. Shiny as crystal lace frost.
I loved him the way it feels when you get hot wax on the inside of your wrist and while it's burning, just as sudden, it's a cool thick skin. Like it tastes to eat sweet snow, above the daffodil bulbs - not that I've ever found it, but clean snow that melts to nothing on the heat of your tongue so that you aren't even sure if it was ever there. I loved him like spaniel joy at a scent in the grass - riveted, lost. I loved him so much that it felt as if it had to be taken away from me at any moment, changed - how could something like that be allowed to exist on this earth?
We lived in apartments that faced each other and sometimes I'd look up when I was painting and I'd see him watching me but then he'd look away. I watched him, too, when he was practicing his guitar sometimes. We nodded when we saw each other in the street but we never spoke. I went to Mirror one night by myself and when I heard him sing I would feel everything he was feeling. I could feel the throb in the ankle he'd twisted jumping into the pit a couple of night before, the way the sweat was trickling down his temples, making them itch, the way his throat felt a little bit scratchy and sore and how he wanted to go away from that smoky room, drive out to the lake for some air, how there was something from his childhood that he was trying to forget by singing but how it never quite left him - though I couldn't quite feel what it was. I have felt people before; my mom used to call me an empath. When she got sick I developed lumps in my breasts and my hair was falling out for a while. It only happened with people I loved, though. Never a stranger. Never a singing stranger with golden hair tousled in his face and deep-set blue eyes and a big Adam's apple. Maybe my empathy was just because of him. He coud make you feel things. Maybe every person in that room was feeling what he did.
But this was what was strange - he knew me, too. He gazed down through the smoke and kept looking at me while he sang about the shard of glass in his eye. Trying to melt it away. Tears. But he was dry. When it was over I felt like I'd been kissed for hours all over my body. I could feel my own tears running down my cheeks and neck. I felt small and stupid-looking and bald when it was over, when I came back to my body and my shorn head. I wanted to go and hide from him. But he found me. He came walking through the crowd and smoke and everyone was trying to talk to him or touch him and he looked wiped out. He looked like he had given every single thing and what could they want from him now? His eyes looked bigger and more hollowly set and I could feel his dry burning glass-stung eyes. He came up to me and sat down and he asked right then if I wanted to get out of there with him, if I wanted to go get high or whatever, he had to get out right now, he liked the tattoo of the rose on the inside of my wrist. He didn't say anything about recognizing me from before.
The streets were slick with frost, my fingers and nose and toes went numb, my toes knocking against my boots with hammering pain. I didn't care. I watched him light a cigarette, holding it in his hand with the fingerless mittens, cupping the flame, protecting it, handing it to me, lighting another for himself. He said he thought smoking was a primitive reflex to the cold - like building fires. The cold inside, too. Our boots crunched through thin sheets of ice. I thought that if I were still crying my tears would freeze and I could give them to him - icicles to suck on. But he needed warming, to be kissed with the fire of a thousand cigarettes.
We walked for a while and then he got a cab and we went to his place. That's when he said he hoped I didn't mind, that he'd been watching me through the window, he wasn't a crazy stalker or anything, he just couldn't help it. He said not to take this the wrong way but I reminded him of a sister. He said he believed in that thing about everyone having another half out there, like a twin, that you were supposed to find and that almost no one ever did. We sat in the room that I'd seen through glass for so long, the room with the mattress and the music and the thrift shop lamps and we got high and talked all night. Mostly I did; I told him about my mom and he just listened, but he kept thanking me for telling him. It was almost as if hearing it was as much a relief for him as my saying it. We both kept saying how relieved we felt - relieved, that was the word we kept using. I was like an accident victim who's been rescued, pulled breathing from the wreckage - until I began to feel afraid.
continued...