Combustion

nebula: six

In a way, Emma, you were toxic. I craved you in every way imaginable. I wonder if you knew that wild things like you are a magnet for intensity. And maybe that's why you always burned bright behind my eyelids. When it wasn't English class, when you weren't there, I imagined you were. I could feel you across all the dimensions.

There was the surface: your hair, brown and thick, kissed by the wind. It was long and impossibly free. Your hair was perfectly messed. I wondered how it would feel to run my hands through it, for my fingers to add even more tangles to its art.

I could see your eyes: chocolate in the shade, topaz in the light. You never liked them much, but you never saw them at the right time. I don't think you ever caught that maniacal glint or knew just how much that look tore up my heart. You didn't know that sometimes your eyes would be wilder than your hair. You wanted your eyes to be green, so that they would pierce through everything you looked at and glow in the night. But your eyes pierced slowly, the way that a fire is slow to catch. I wouldn't noticed the burn until it was much too late. Your eyes would stick to me, and I could see them in the dark. I could envision the way your marbled brown eyes would glitter with have-to's.

When you were not there, I could still imagine your beat-up sneakers, tapping along to a beat the rest of us could not tune into. Shoes, that looked like they had romped their last adventure, but continued on anyways. Your shoes were sloppily tied. Mud would cling to their soles. They were shoes with more stories to tell than people.

I could picture your silhouette in the shadows of my mind. Legs long and muscles tense, ready to spring into action. I can see the curve of your fingertips, maybe a paintbrush poised in your hands. I can see you smiling so fiercely and wonderfully that it was almost terrifying. I can feel that smile seizing me, urging me to keep moving and evolving as if it was possible to ever reach your level. 

I can imagine you perfectly in the first dimension, this surface level observation. But it was the fact that I could picture every detail that burned under your exterior with such extraordinary precision that made me little more than a moth drawn to flame.

There was the artist, with flecks of paint in your hair. The artist with sunsets burning in your veins and thunderstorms in your head. I can see you painting or embroidering or doing street art and pouring every once of your infinite being into a piece of art as if it was your first and your last all at the same time. I can see your clothes stained with marker, your fingers comfortably hugging a stick of charcoal, your hands spilling with clay. You would be wearing a smock speckled with bits of disaster and imagination. You would be too excited to pull up your hair, but colors looked nice on you. I could see you holding a camera with the lens pointed at the stars.

There was the scholar, burning through school work, tackling it to plunge into yet another adventure. You were messily organized, with rainbows in your notes in failed attempts to color code. I could see your desk, cluttered with books both finished and yet to start. I could see you devouring a textbook, voraciously absorbing details that somehow you managed to find exciting. I could see you exploring what had already been explored and twisting it so that you were the conqueror. You would type an essay without hesitance, a bravery that few had mastered. I could see notebooks, spilling with doodles and messages written in highlighters and gel pens. You would finish your assignments furiously, before your motivation had run out, and you would move onto another activity without batting an eye.

And you were a dreamer. I could see constellations shimmering behind your eyes. You were full of half-fathomed imaginings that found reality through your actions. You were the type of person who was too excited to sleep, and I swear that you didn't need many hours to run on. You were a loud person in a quiet town. You were the oyster with the pearl. You were the moment the sky breaks as a storm sets in. You were red and fire and electricity thrown together in chaotic perfection.

Still, you were more. I can't describe you as just an artist or philosopher or visionary, because like I've said- black and white don't exist for you. You were everything all at once. Even though you were so many things in a single instant, even though your characteristics should have blurred around you in a confusing clash of contradictions that never should have been paired together, you made so much sense to me. I could still see you behind those shrouds of adjectives that would never describe you as well as your name did.

I wonder if I knew that you were impossible. I had been tormented by your easy complexities, burned by your flaming personality, and I was so very smitten. In my mind, I had made you into something else entirely, because your flaws turned to mist in my mind. And you were perfect and remarkable and everything you ever wanted to be. And I called that Emma. I saw your incredibility at every second in the day. You had seared yourself in my bloodstream.

I know I've said it before, Emma, but you were a lightning bolt. You were that shivering spark of static arching through the air. You never struck me the same way twice, and each hit was ten thousand times more brilliant than the last. I never knew where you were going to land or what scar you were going to leave. I just knew that whatever mark you made would be scintillating. All I knew was that you were fast and brilliant and stormy. I knew that you were going to shake up my entire world and streak through my whole life from the time that you sprinted into the classroom. And Emma, I would fly a key-topped kite on top of a skyscraper just to have the pleasure to be struck by you.