• She Loved Him

    She loved him like you love a fish, or a stray cat.
    A wild thing that is never really yours.

    She loved the way he walked and the way he moved.
    She loved the way he claimed to refuse to wear wool on moral grounds.
    She loved his annoying little turn of phrase. Always calling her “doll” and “swell.”
    She loved how he could recite every Mel Brooks movie by heart, and did.
    She loved the way he sang to her in public, whenever it occurred to him.

    But most of all, she loved the way he talked to her.
    He always talked about the impending somewhere that was just around the bend or over the hill or blocked by an ill-placed tree.
    He never lost the adolescently foolish notion that things are bound to get better eventually.
    He found a way to take the very small bad things out of very large good things and show these flaws to the world, just to prove how very good the latter had been.
    He thought that the world needed happiness, but happiness did not need the world.

    He found the strangest ways to compliment her.
    “Your voice is exceedingly pretty today,” he'd say.
    Or; “Your fingers are really quite splendid.”

    She would take these compliments with bemusement at first, but once someone says something, it plants a seed in your brain.
    She began to hear bells in her voice.
    She began to see the dainty shape of her fingers.
    And it made her love him.

    In turn, he found the most extravagant ways of insulting her.
    “Your eyes look like moldy gerbil vomit!” he had been known to say in the heat of the moment.
    Or even; “For all the stars in the sky, for all the suns that burn and the glaciers that freeze, I cannot for the life of me think why anyone would keep you near them.”

    She found these insults peppered into the arguments they had, and thought them exceedingly amusing.
    To a point.
    But then the seed began to sprout.
    She began seeing sickishly gerbilish mold in her irises.
    She began seeing faults in her personality, flaws in her manners.
    People didn't seem to want her near them.

    But he did.
    And so she loved him.
    Like a fish, or a stray cat.
    A wild thing that is never really yours.