-Where have you been?
-Huh?
Huh? What huh?
-Where have you been? I repeated, frustrated.
She tilted her head and looked at me like a confused puppy. I asked the question once more, with the addition of "all this time". She looked deeper into my eyes, unintentionally perhaps. We shared a moment of silence with only the hungry screams of seagulls accompanied by tides crashing into the shore. A pale sky, completely white, met by the darkness of the horizon.
There was the sound of people yelling, they were yelling out to her, no, they were yelling at her. I couldn't tell, the white noise muffled their voices into nothing but a steady hum in the background. Her eyes were still on mine, they scanned me carefully, as though I were a whole new species that she had yet to meet.
-What are you talking about silly? I was here all along.
She smiled at me shortly, but it was not a small smile, it was the kind of smile that she had practiced in front of the mirror all her life. Then she ran off, towards the ocean. I sat back on the sand, a clearing made just for me, where wet sticks poked violently out from the ground and bundles of cracked seashells formed uneven shapes. When I looked at the sea, she was still running, her wet dress sticking to her legs. The scene before me kept repeating itself, but sometimes she was wearing different clothes in them, and sometimes her hair was done in a different way. But she not once stopped running.
For as long as I could remember, the clouds were grey and covered everything from the skyline to another. But it was not a dark and damp kind of grey, it was the kind that appeared at noon on hot, humid days but never brought a storm with it. It was simply there, trees glued to the wind and the smell of seaweed circling them.
I don't know if that Sunday on the white beach was a memory of mine, or a memory of Jamie's. I don't know for sure if it was a memory at all, or something that my mind created to confuse me.
To be honest, I have a lot of memories from that time, sticky, messy and vocal memories. I think that kind of memories are the ones that we carry to our graves, the kind that one just can't shake off even in their sleep. Because they are dreams, surreal, abstract, liquid that runs off the palm. I remember the melancholy of the trees, naked in the cold, just like me. When it didn't rain, the sky was fuming in yellow and dust, reigning filth. I hated that sky, and it was because I hated it so much that I also loved it. Not at the same time, of course, but it tore me in two and I did not even mind the pain.
Sometimes I wondered if Jamie also watched the empty roads from afar; the pale light of the street lamps grinning in the night. When it was particularly dark, the scenery looked to be monotonic, and when I stared into the light, I could no longer see color. She often walked that road, rarely alone, but even when she was hanging onto someone's arm, she looked more alone than ever. This scene played before my eyes, and it bore itself into my shattered mind.
I remembered a girl with brown hair who used to live by the river in a large suburban house. When I visited her on those late Autumn nights, I remember how it was as though I'd entered another world. A world not mine. The house was painted in mansion yellow, and inside it was covered from floor to ceiling in dark wallpaper with birds, flowers, stripes, and different patterns. On the walls were lots of portraits, small but dipped in massive frames. "The house belonged to my family, it's been with us for more than a century", she told me when I was studying the white and bony faces in the paintings. The river ran colder each time I stopped by, and the house began to make weird noises, that possibly being one of the reasons why she called me there more often. She was weak, I knew it from the first time we met. And she would eventually crumble in my hands, I knew that as well.
But upon seeing Jamie's figure burn into a black silhouette against the sun, a void within me was filled by her bare presence. She got off the train and looked both ways before jolting into the 7-Eleven to buy a coffee, black. We walked like this at least three times a week, with me trying to either walk ahead of her or behind her, but to not make it seem like I was tailing her. I wanted her to think I wasn't there, that I was just a stranger she couldn't recognize. And maybe, if she thought that way, I could pretend that she was just a stranger as well. In the times when I walked in front of her, I knew she didn't look my way, on purpose or not, I could not feel her gaze on me like she must have felt mine on her.
The days changed, but she never did, all eyes were on her, but she returned none of their stares. Winter came forth again and again, silent flakes of snow blurring the skyline. I watched as the white scenery traveled from the parking lot to the river, from where it molded into small hills and bumps of a forest. But what I would eventually remember from that view were the endless white and the frozen sunrise. I wanted to turn around and look at her, not to admire her but to possibly find something new, a flaw, something that I could use against her. But the harder I looked, the less I saw, her white hair and amused smile terrorizing every corner of my mind. I hated her.
On that day, I stood at the edge of a frosty cornfield, staring blankly into the distance where diamonds glimmered in the light. It was cold, but the air stood still, hollow, and pressed to my skin like a hand. Everywhere I turned my gaze, a rosy color painted my surroundings. The sky was breathing.
Rapid footsteps stomped over the thin layer of snow behind me. I was quick to face her, just in time to see her eyes scanning me, and that was what caught me by surprise. I had been wrong, she had been watching me, I just couldn't sense it. Her eyes were glassy and reflected the wintry nature as though they were small mirrors or pathways to an alternate reality. The moment of contact was brief, but it would stick with me as long as I could remember it.
Out of impulse, I grabbed her by the wrist before she had the chance to walk past me like she probably had on any other normal day. She stopped in her tracks, but did not gasp, she did not resist, and that's how I knew. Snowflakes fell and melted on her lips, the water eventually dripping down her jaw.
-You just don't give up, do you? She finally spoke, and I could feel the hatred fill me, bursting through the seams.
My grip around her wrist tightened, I wanted her to wince out in pain so that even for a brief moment her face would lose all color and she would look at me, look at me not as something carved into the ground but as something human, with blood and throbbing flesh. But her eyes remained the same, not losing their composure and the white evil hidden beneath them. Why wouldn't she budge? Was I too weak to even make her flinch? The woman narrowed her eyes when she faced me feet first, and she made that tilting motion with her head just like I had envisioned she would.
I wanted to forget her face, voice and essence. It was as though she was a part of the sleepy winter scenery, one with the snow and a brutal heaven in her eyes. But she was surely no angel, because no god could protect her, and no human could tame her. In the end, she was just another me, in another world that was frighteningly close to mine.
