Days with Ella went by like weeks, weeks passing like months, months like years. We mostly spent our time at each of our flats; some days at hers, some days at mine. We only went to hers when she had classes the next day, or when she would come home from work. I would either surprise her by being there before she was, or visiting her at the shoppe. It became routine for us to be together whenever we were able to. Although we weren't clinged to each other constantly. Ella was attempting to patch things up with her friends, who for whatever reason, are angry with her.
When not at her job, listening to lectures - which she absolutely hated - or busy with her friends, we remained in bed, partially because the heating was broken, causing the entire flat to be colder than the bloody North Pole. I called the landlord four times, and of course, he never returned any of them, being the irresponsible twat he is. When I first moved in, I found three holes in three different walls, covered up with plaster and paint. It took me eight months to realize that I was going to have to fix it myself to get it done.
Ella and I had huddled ourselves under the heavy duvet, bringing our bodies as close to each other as possible, the body warmth beneficial. I remember finding a bunch of socks with fuzzy material on the inside of them, buried in the corner of my underwear drawer. I believe I had gotten them as a Christmas present one year from Victoria. What a shitty gift.
As we put them on, Ella began giggling uncontrollably. After asking her why, she said the pattern on the pair I was wearing was ridiculous. I didn't think they were all that hideous; the flashes of the word "Pow!" scattered on them didn't make much of a difference to me.
"You do realize that you're twenty three, right?" she teased.
I let her continue on, cracking joke after joke. She made it seem funnier than it actually was, but I didn't mind her taunting. Hearing her adorable laugh and seeing her angelic smile made my heart flutter against my chest. Later on that night, we were in the process of falling asleep, limbs entangled, and I felt her small feet lovingly wrap around my ankle, almost as if to apologize for making fun of them.
I came to love her habits and her quirks, as they were part of her.
I fell in love with the way she liked to sit when watching movies, her legs folded up, knees to her chest. Her eyebrows would screw together in concentration as she tried to hear the dialogue, and she would laugh louder and harder than necessary at terrible comedies. She would sit cross-legged during horror films, tiny hands balled up in fists near her face, prepared to cover her eyes if needed. She said she didn't like to sit near people while watching scary movies; her nails were long and she "didn't want to hurt me by clawing at my arm."
I fell in love with how she ventured to do things herself, like stacking books on top of one another on a chair to reach a mug on the highest shelf in a cabinet. I recall the time she wanted to cook me dinner, pasta and tomato sauce with beef being the only thing she knew how to make, besides grilled cheese and scrambled eggs. The fire underneath the sauce was too high, resulting in the sauce boiling and flowing over the pot, spilling all over the stove into the fire. The unpleasant smell of tomatoes mingled with smoke suffused her apartment, the odor setting off the smoke detector. In a panic, she climbed on a chair, standing up on the counter to fan it with a dish rag. It's a wonder how she never fell.
I fell in love with how passionate she was about photography, despite the numerous amount of times she complained about the classes and lectures she had to attend. After a night at her apartment, I wandered into her kitchen one morning while she slept, searching for something to cook for breakfast. I spotted a table with countless pictures dispersed along it, along with about four different cameras. One being a large Polaroid, one a small Canon, one a small Nikon, and another I couldn't name. It looked like the one paparazzi carry around. I scrunched my nose in disgust just at the thought. As I came closer to the table, I distinguished the pictures were a mixture of things; some photographs of people, others of landmarks around London, some of random choice. I noticed there was a picture of myself; a Polaroid. I picked it up, wondering when Ella took this. I appeared to be in the middle of laughing, probably at something stupid. I then felt two arms envelop my hips, a light kiss placed to the middle of my back.
"What are you looking at?" she mumbled into my skin, peeking her head over my shoulder.
I asked her when she took the photo, and she grabbed it out of my hand, a smirk playing on the ends of her lips.
"Whenever I take pictures of people..." she begun, neatly putting the photo back in it's spot. "People I know, that is, I never tell them when I took the picture. If I do, it ruins the spontaneous aspect of it. And whenever I have a camera, they'll be prepared for me to take a picture, so they either hide their face or they pose for it. Either way, you can't see what the person is feeling in the picture; there's no emotion. You could be smiling in a photo and be the saddest person on earth. But, if I take the picture by surprise, that moment of happiness, or sadness, or whatever that person is feeling, is captured, and it's natural. It's not forced."
She glanced at me, grinning. "And I'm always nonchalant about it, so they never know that I'm taking the picture. That's the fun part."
She had then sauntered over to the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge, retrieving a carton of eggs, in addition to bacon. She opened a cabinet, dragged a chair that was in living room, using cooking books piled on top of one another to stand on, getting a hold of the muffins that remained on the top shelf.
"Why do you put things so high if you know you can't reach them?" I questioned, chuckling.
As she hopped down, she turned to me, shrugging. "I like a challenge."
And I remember smiling, knowing then that I didn't want to share a bed with anyone else. I didn't want to spend a majority of my time with anyone else. I didn't want to sit and laugh with and watch dumb movies with and kiss and make love to anyone else.
Ella was alI I needed. And all I ever wanted.
