I had a name for this book but I forgot.

Part Five: Love. I. Think.

I've loved a great deal of people in my life time but I'm not sure what love is interiorly. I am convinced you can only love someone in the moment. You can always love them for who they were in that moment but you can't always love someone. You see people are subject to change and you can't always love someone despite change. I don't think this makes love any less valuable or pure.
I love Nicholas for his complexities, I love The Fox for his loyalty, I love Kansas for his simplistic nature, and I love Sarah for unique state of mind.
I loved my first girlfriend for her goofy idealistic predominantly. I loved Courtney for her chaotic lifestyle. I loved Elizabeth for her passion.
       You see dear reader, somewhere always I have a very strong passion for passion and that's amazing in moments like these because sometimes in very special cases with very special people, their passion can grow from my passion for their passion especially when that passion is for me. There's only one tiny problem that much passion tends to burn out quickly. In our case not so much.
Three years is a long time, maybe not so much when you look at it in comparison to thirty years but considering I don't remember what I ate yesterday it's pretty long time to remember every exact golden flake in her eyes as she look at me the next morning.
Elizabeth was a lot of things, she was creative and lost, she was cute and mean, she was incredible loving yet still strikingly hatful, she was a cup of black coffee with strawberry donut chaser. Elizabeth's own emotions got the better of her constantly, she was horrible at expressing herself but so dramatic with with her actions. This beautiful darling little girl was looking for something painful. She wore it on her wrist. She was spoiled beyond repair. She was a princess in the kingdom of her own imagination and that kingdom was haunted by ghost.
Most of all she was mine, not perfectly. Definitely not forever. Only in brief moments when I could capture it with my eyes and store it away with my thoughts. At those times I had her completely.
I arrived early to school the next morning with my brand new used clarinet in hand. I walk to the band hall to find all the students were loading up a bus to drive over to the middle school and play for the youngsters about to take their  S.T.A.R.R.S test which if they fail they will be told the last year of there lives were wasted because they couldn't fill out bubbles well enough with coinciding trivia questions. They needed all the help they could get.
      I rode over with them and pretended really well that I knew what I was doing when assembling a clarinet. I did not however pretend to play the thing. I had fun with it anyways shit nothing could have held me back. It was 8 A.M. and I wasn't in class do you can chalk that one up to a win any day.
Elizabeth wasn't having as much fun. She was playing her clarinet with the same intensity that I was staring at her with. Maybe it was wrong of me, maybe all of this could have been avoided if I could have just looked away but I didn't. She seemed mad and in slight anticipation, for what? The answer to that still haunts me.
The performance was drawn to a close. The kids shuffled out of the gym like the prisoners they were. The rest of us packed up out instrument and returned to the bus. I was seated next to   Nicholas.
The she devil herself was directly in front of me two seats forward and I didn't pay her a split of attention as I was the only one without my instrument in cased in its carrying contraction.
She spun around in her seat, looked me dead in the eyes again for the second time that day only this time with pure anger and said "if you ever try to play a clarinet again I'm going to break your nose" then she let out a little smile like she was proud of herself for finding the ability to break the silence between us.
     It broke alright from that moment forward she was almost a leaky sink of words of the bipolar verity. That's the way Elizabeth was. A moment caught in eye contact were her eyes weeped with longing  into the next fiery death stare of pure anger. She did whatever it took to express herself because she had too.
The next morning was a complete 180 she didn't break my nose. She looked at me like she was on the verge of tears and nobody was around to save her. When the bell rang everyone went to class expect for us. We stayed right there and she fell apart right in the middle of the auditorium. She told things I never wanted to hear. She told me things that wish I could forget. In that moment Elizabeth's eyes trusted me with an emotion stronger than passion. In that moment I had her again. In that moment I swear that if she was a few years old she would be leaving there with me and we would have went back. She wasn't. We didn't.
   Our teacher found us sitting right outside the class room door in a sort of defiance that no teacher would understand that something are just more important then information that doesn't need to be stored in your brain for instant recall.
That day something happened the flakes in her eyes got a little softer. She goofy smile got a little bigger for however brief and I think somebody told the time to listen and understand her for the first time and a long time. I don't know why she wasted time looking at me but she did and in that moment she loved what she saw. Even if I don't know what that means.