I met her several times before we ever even acknowledged the existence of one another. I met her in my most intoxicated moments, and it was because she saw me at my most vulnerable that I initially attempted to delay our first exchange of words. During the final stages of Autumn I noticed her, within the rotten air, yellow skies, I found it inevitable to defy each encounter. Her presence slowly began to creep into me, and as ashamed as I am to admit it, I let it. I fought back, scraped at the walls, scratching my own skin, yet she remained within my darkest of voids.
Even before we met, I knew her hair was white, I knew her eyes were a dull hazel and skin pale and bruised. She was the stranger at the door, knocking on the window, giggling next to me in the dark. I knew I could not run from her, for she would know exactly where to find me.
She once held my hand, her palm the melting roadside snow, stained with filth, brown just like our utopian ocean. It terrified me, just how close she sat, how daringly she gazed at me, studying, challenging. I spat fire, digging deeper into the sand, she could not see beneath the surface, she had to be kept in the dark. And so I raced with her, with myself, and with my denial of her existence. Yet she was right there, sitting, smirking, watching, she knew. She had to, didn't she?
In my times of death, my many deaths that seemed to reoccur daily and in the most cruel of ways, I was confronted by this white-haired entity. Smitten, wary, I listened to her introduce herself every time, until I could no longer remember her name. But unfortunately for me I could not forget her hungry stare, the inhumanity that devoured me whole.
On Wednesdays I watched her as she sat by her desk, folded her books and notebooks in front of her, before crossing her skinny arms over the table and lifting her gaze. A rash irritated the back of her neck, and every once in a while she moved to scratch it, but then pulled her hand back in pain. I never did find out if it was her rash that caused the pain or her hand. But in the end I deemed it too bothersome to ever investigate the truth.
I was also hesitant of looking her in the eye on the rare occasions that we happened to speak to each other, so in my helpless state I found staring at her lips the the most convenient option. But as I stared at her dry, slightly cracked lips form word after word, I realized I was no longer even following what she was saying.
"Hi, I'm Jamie. Who are you?"
As winter came forth, she started wearing a long coat and a dusty rose -colored muffler that covered her mouth. She drove an old but well-kept car that she parked in the same spot each morning, before rushing to greet her friends. However she seemed to have an alter ego of some sort, or perhaps that was who she truly was; the occasional looks that she would take back, over her shoulder and past her companions, there was nothing natural about them. I believed that she knew something, something that only the two of us knew. But at the time I considered this an exciting lie that I was merely toying with, fantasizing about and getting drunk on.
I was never one to have a steady routine as she did, I would even dare to say I had no purpose. For years on hold I had been living one day at a time, waiting for a miracle.
Waiting for her.
But when she eventually appeared, I was baffled, beyond disappointed. She was nowhere near the guardian angel or the soldier of eternity that I had envisioned for every day and night until then. She resembled everything I despised from the bottom of my heart; she was fueled by humanity, her blood ran warm and red, just like that of any other mortal. But I knew it was her.
I lived on the far end of the city, where the greenery and luminous sky met the industrial smog, brown and grey warehouses and slavish office buildings, sat one after another by the road and riverbank. Only a lone bridge connected our dusty paradise to the modernity of the middle class. I crossed this bridge twice a day, or four times, depending on whether I forgot something at home or just wanted to breathe. But eventually I came to wish I'd rather just drowned in the river, because on a particularly windy night I found her standing atop the bridge, eyes locked on the gentle movement of the water. When she spotted me at the other end, she left and never showed up there again, and it was at that moment that I realized what it meant. She knew.
