Winter
John stepped onto the dying grass. He wasn’t dressed as properly as he should have for the bitterness of the day’s cold. It penetrated the thin jacket he threw on and made his body heat recede from his hands and feet and into his very core. He was left trembling.
If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to give a sensible answer as to why he ventured to the local park. He felt compelled to leave the comforts of his warm bed and bear the frigidness that rendered the once robust greens of the pines and flourishing plants that adorned the edge of the pond into barren skeletal husks. Even the vibrancy of the grass had faded away into a dismal sickliness.
He sat down at one of the benches and watched the pale sun shimmer on the surface of the pond. His hands searched for warmth in his jacket pockets as his mind searched for answers. Answers for questions his mind would always seem to turn to. At times the questions would emerge from the corners of his mind, taking him and pulling him deep into the murkiness of his thoughts.
Today, however, they seemed to compel his every movement, every decision. He was completely swept up by them and saw the world through them. He hadn’t spoken to anyone and didn’t feel any desire to. He wanted solitude. He needed space to ruminate.
He didn’t know what he expected to discover. At times he thought that he enjoyed doing this to himself, turning the same earth that he’d dredged through for years now. The shock had long passed, yet its effects remained for certain. They shadowed every moment, followed in lockstep as he wandered around the town, living his day to day. There hasn’t been a day that had gone by where he hadn’t thought of her. He no longer felt bitter or scornful, but the pain still lingered. The aching loss had never truly faded. He wasn’t sure if it ever would.
He didn’t know how to proceed in life. He wasn’t the same person he was before he had met her. He probably couldn’t recognize his past self if he saw him in the mirror. He felt as though he were only a mess of pieces that used to make up a person. Pieces that, if put together, would reveal many of them missing.
He wondered if there was any saving him. If there was any solace to be found for him. He looked at the pond and asked himself how deep it might be. He imagined how peaceful it would be at the bottom. No voices or past to follow you into its dark depths. Only the somber stillness of the water and the promise of oblivion.
She would have been so sad to hear his thoughts. What he had come to. She was always so quick to comfort him and loved nothing more than to relieve him of what would be weighing him down at any moment. Claire had a knack for that. She could see the joy in the most mundane of situations. For the most part, he felt he bore witness to a force of nature when he saw just how her radiance could imbue the world around her with life. She even seemed to cut the winter in which they had met short, as if she beckoned spring itself. The cutting winds took him back to the first days in which they knew each other.
She had been there in the background of his daily life for some time. He had looked at her from time to time, yet only truly saw her on the night of a coworker’s birthday party. The way her eyes took him in as he spoke to her about what he felt were innocuous details, nothing worthy of the rapt intensity she was giving him. The way she spoke to him as if she had nothing to hide. She was not polished by any means. Her movements were not studied or practiced, yet she still had a certain grace to her, a raw life that flowed forth with every tilt of her head or raises of a brow. Even such a brief glimpse into who this girl might be instilled an overwhelming desire in John to know her more closely.
...
They made plans to meet at a coffee shop downtown. He wasn’t a coffee person, but he didn’t want to decline her invitation. He arrived early enough to be courteous but not so early to be seen as overly wrought by anticipation. He sat at a table for two which had a clear view of the entrance. He waited in his pool of terrible excitement that caused him to bite his nails or bounce his leg. He waited as long as he could hold himself from checking his watch to do so. When he did it was ten minutes past the time they agreed to meet. He thought that maybe he missed her when he went to the restroom or maybe he went to the wrong coffee shop.
It was almost twenty minutes after that he saw her throw open the wooden door up front and met him with a guilty smile.
“I’m so sorry, I was getting ready and got so behind that I had to rush here.” She pulled her chair and sat. “I’m really sorry.”
She looked absolutely radiant. “It’s okay.”
“No. Really, it isn’t”
“No, no. In all honesty, I got here a little late too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So it’s alright, I didn’t wait very long.”
Her eyes drifted downward in a look of concession before shooting up to meet his. She smiled. “Okay. I still feel bad though.”
They sat across from each other at the small table and made idle conversation. From where John sat, the sunlight from outside brimmed around Claire and made it look as if she were glowing. He never noticed how beautiful she was. Her skin was flawless and pale, like winter’s first snow. She had an energy about her that seemed unbound by anything that brought John to a standstill. Each word had so much life and passion instilled in them that he couldn’t help but be engrossed by her speaking about her plans for college or her love of music. He talked to her about his favorite movies and how he would, as a child, write his own crude comics that he’d show his classmates and teachers. Every time he made her laugh, it came as robust and guttural as if it came from deep within her soul and bellowed out into the world.
The sun no longer shone around her, as it had begun to set. That was the first indication that made John check the time. They had been there for nearly two hours. She saw him look at his watch and must have seen the look of subtle surprise on his face.
“Well…it’s getting kind of late. Maybe I should head back home.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Do you work tomorrow?”
John made himself look thoughtful even though he knew he had no plans. “No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I.” She tried to hide a budding mischievous smile. “Do you wanna come by and see my guitar?”
“Uhh…sure, yeah. That sounds like fun.”
...
She had her own apartment which she had been living in for a couple of months. Though it was small and a little cramped, she had made the most of every inch and imbued it with a visual aesthetic that reflected her interests. Succulents rested on corner shelves. A tapestry of the moon and its phases hung from the wall. Various pictures, including one of her posing in front of the Grand Canyon and another of her at the beach with her mother, were displayed under the small television. The first thing that John noticed when he walked in, however, was that entire apartment smelled of a sweet and rich earthiness, a scent that would seep into his very being over the next two years and which emanated from a diffuser in the corner of the living space. Upon asking what it was, she told him that it was called vanilla and patchouli.
They stayed up late into the night sitting on her couch and she told him about her strict parents and oppressive childhood, her sister who lived in a city too far to see her as much as she would want, and past experiences with guys who had lied to her and left their marks. John would tell her about his own family, how he would grow up as one of five children and had parents who were more concerned with how they could be the ones to hurt each other the most than nurture their kids. He would tell her about his lack of friends in high school or how his first girlfriend never made him feel anything beyond platonic obligation. At some point she started on the topic of her dreams of traveling from the town in which she was raised and had been for her entire life. She spoke of having a van that she would live in and would use to drive across the country, visiting places she had never been and meeting people she had never met. He instinctively thought this a childish pipe dream, yet the more she went on with such a brazen reverent conviction the more convinced he became in his heart that she would surely do it one day.
As the night passed on they drew closer and closer. At some point their eyes became locked onto each other, their gazes being imbued with a similar intensity as that of a steady flame. Their voices grew softer, their words taking on an unrushed pace as their breaths drew deeper, trembling slightly as their chests fell and rose. He looked to her lips now, in their glossy fullness. He wasn’t even aware that he was leaning closer to her until he felt their lips meet and their hands pull their bodies close, running across their shoulders and through their hair and wrapping around their waists. He spent the first of many nights there in her bed, and in the mornings to come he would gradually get to know some of her eccentricities and how they radiated a charm he had not seen before or since.
Throughout it all, however, a pervasive nervousness, an undercurrent of anxiety, had made itself felt within him regarding this budding relationship, as if it were resting in his palms and one small act of carelessness could end it all. He found himself waiting for something to go wrong, as it always did. He did his best to hide this from her, as he was worried it would scare her away. It was nothing worth drawing attention to, he thought. Maybe it would go away in time the more comfortable he would become with her. That’s what he had hoped.
...
This anxiety, however,even followed him to his dreams. At one point he found himself wading in a vast pool of waist-high water. All around him was a mist that gently erased the edges of the world around him, reducing the horizon to a gray swath. He was trying to get further from where he thought the shore was because she was there. He kept looking around his shoulder, making sure the expanse surrounding him remained empty. Once comfortable enough with the distance, he came to a standstill and began to relieve himself. He felt the water around his waist grow warmer even as he seeped back into consciousness. After a moment of feeling the warmth run from his crotch to under his thigh, he clenched the flow of urine while simultaneously shooting to an upright seated position. It was the middle of the night and everything was still in the faint light coming from the bathroom. He crawled out of the bed and looked down at the deep gray splotch on the sheets, next to which Claire lay sleeping without a stir. He assessed his situation with a mix of horror and levelheadedness. He went to the bathroom to remove his soiled garments and to finish his business. After which he walked to the foot of the bed and did his best to master himself before coaxing Claire awake as gently as he possibly could. The room began to smell of ammonia.
“Claire.” He whispered as he softly pushed her.
No response. She looked so peaceful with her mouth slightly agape and the slightest bit of drool crawling down her cheek. He hated he was doing this even more. He had to push himself to try again.
“Claire. Hey.”
“Hm.” She shifted her head and what would be her gaze to where he was, but her eyes remained closed.
“Hey. I peed the bed.”
“You what?”
“I, uh, I peed the bed.”
“Okay.” She said as she sleepily rose to her feet.
Together they removed the wetted sheets from the bed, which included one given to her by her grandmother. John went into the shower to rinse off and once out Claire had already prepared the bed with fresh sheets. They then, without skipping a beat, returned to bed.
They woke up the next morning facing each other, almost simultaneously. Once their eyes met, John raised the sheets with one arm and checked underneath them. He looked back at her.
“We’re clean.”
A smile broke across Claire’s face and they both welcomed that morning in laughter.
...
As the weeks passed he found himself leaving from her place to his place of work and returning there after clocking out. He showered and ate there. Soon enough it became easier to leave some of his clothes there. One day she surprised him with his own toothbrush that would be kept there. Eventually, the spare key she kept hidden under one of the outdoor potted plants became his personal copy which he carried and would use to come and go as he needed. At her protest and his insistence, he even began to help pay rent.
One day they went grocery shopping together, as they had a mutual craving for grilled cheese sandwiches. At some point during the drive to the store, Claire would say something that caused the young man to look at her, his gaze lingering for a moment, and shake his head looking away, smiling. He then got quiet. This would happen from time to time, as he was prone to sulk in moods of self-pity or frustration. His reluctance to open up about what would be bothering him would worry her. She had wished that he would communicate his misgivings and let her into his heart this way. Yet, the moment in question was not one of these moments.
In truth, the silence came from simply being in awe of her. He was amazed at the brazenness at which she approached her days and realized he had never met someone as authentically and unapologetically beautiful as she. She was not polished or smooth by any means, but her rough edges themselves had a charming grace that he found intoxicating. Her incandescence made him speechless.
She asked him over and over what was wrong, pleading with him to tell her. He would tell her it was nothing, that everything was alright, and that she didn’t need to worry. She didn’t believe him. So, at some point in the ice cream aisle, she would ask him again for perhaps the thirty-second time, and he turned to look her in the eyes and would say that what he was going to tell her was that he loved her. The words came out of him as naturally as a breath would.
She looked at him with her mouth slightly open and in silence, her eyes wide. He worried for an instant that he went too far too soon, that this was something that should have been given more time, said at the right moment. He felt his body paralyze and his heart started to fall to the floor.
Yet her expression softened and her lips began to curl into a dimpled smile that took his breath away.
She said to him, in an astonished delight, that she had wanted to be the one to say it first.
