Katrina

It was raining the day I met her, a soft mist that soaked her long brown hair and made the asphalt shine dully with a slick rainbow layer of oil. Her dress was just short enough to miss the splash of water from our cab and her dark, flashing eyes saw right through me. She left a lipstick smear on my white collared shirt I couldn’t quite ever bring myself to wash out that night. It’s still hanging in the back of my closet even now, a reminder of everything I’m trying to forget but somehow can’t.

Her heels clicked on the sidewalk as we left the restaurant the next Friday, her hand on my arm, nails perfectly manicured and fingers curled almost possessively. The sky was clear and the stars were bright pinpricks behind the veils of light pollution the city never brings down.

They say the city never sleeps, but all I know is I didn’t want to when I was with her, wandering the yellow-lit sidewalks long after midnight with her hand in mine, spinning circles as the sound of the city swept us farther from the dawn.

(It should have been terrifying, the carelessness with the dark and the strangers surrounding us in the midst of the merciless, ever-pulsing heart of the city, but it wasn’t. )

~

It was raining when she left me, too, when she stepped into a different cab in a different red dress and walked out of my life with the same careless precision she used to wing her eyeliner. She took only what she had brought and left nothing behind, removing everything except the lingering smell of her skin. I watched her leave with the knowledge I didn’t have what she needed to make her stay because she wasn’t meant for one place, one person, even one city.

The rain brought her to me, and when it took her back, like the storm which shared her name, she left me ruined in her wake.

The scent of her perfume clung to everything for weeks until I made myself stop trying to find its traces and left the windows open. I stopped looking for her when I went out, stopped checking my phone in case she changed her mind, stopped waiting for her to make me feel alive and started living again.

I still see her, though.

I see her every time I can’t sleep.

I see us dancing to the rushing sound of the city streets as we pretend we could last forever. I see her name and number on my bedside table when I wake up to the sun streaming through the doors to the balcony we had our first and last kiss on. I see her when I dream, in my passenger seat when I drive, in my kitchen when I come home.

~

(In my head

Every time it rains.)