I had forgotten that you laugh as if you are getting away with something. You often were getting away with something, but even when you weren’t – even when there was nothing to be getting away with – you laughed like you’d won. As if the joke is even funnier because someone, somewhere, doesn’t want you to enjoy it. As if the joke has been delivered to you in private, along secret channels, and hearing it, laughing at it is some kind of rebellion.
This isn’t how you feel, of course. You know there is no one who does not want you to enjoy a joke now and again. There is no one who does not want you to laugh. Nonviolent laughter is healthy and encouraged. It is just the way you look, you understand. It is something about your eyes that hints at subversion.
I had forgotten the way you liked to examine things closely, how you wanted to understand everything. Picking flowers, and obsessing over them, examining each petal as you pulled it away, seeing the veins running through it (useless now, but unaware they are useless now).
I had forgotten that sometimes your thoughts would change direction suddenly, sharply, and your words wouldn’t notice for a couple of sentences, until suddenly they were brought up short and you would fall silent, stunned as you re-calibrated your route. You always had a route, a path, a plan, a direction.
I had forgotten that when you listen to someone else talk, you stare at them – as if trying to understand more than just their words.
I had forgotten you were curious.
I had forgotten you were vivid.
I had forgotten you.
And then…then I had not. The memories of you did not return to me; suddenly they had never left at all, although they had not been there the moment before. I saw you, outside on an autumn day, and there you were. In my mind, iterated many times.
***
People are beautiful because of where they are placed, and where they are placed is beautiful because people are in it.
Not everyone understands art. Not everyone needs to. But everyone foolishly thinks, if they just found the right words, they could. Just place the painting on a white wall in a large hall, and give them a pen and a pad.
But a girl with a cloud of dark hair, a girl who laughs as if she’s getting away with something, should not be against a white wall. She belongs outside on an autumn day.