/lit/ - Literature

There is a ruggedness she has I will miss someday; comedic but genuine. Biting. And warm. A familiarity that one might have with a pubescent friendship turned distantly intimate. I remember awkward ruminations, tired references from media, and sometimes I took in her cadence—body or voice or text—and folded it into my own hesitancy as I typed my thoughts to her. It was a digital epistolary; read in tentative confidence between the two of us. Then maybe a few days, weeks, months, a year, I find her still occasionally wandering my erratic dreams. Assured and mocking, but playful. I realize, possibly even in death, that she will be an etched memory. She will be a young Ammonaria chasing my hobbled, doomed shadow like I am St. Anthony. The mocking desert Sheba to my reluctant temperance. An ancient painting on the walls of my cerebellum’s manor, all bright and formal and assured. Dark-haired and dark-eyed. Pale brown and confident despite her sometimes doleful countenance. A gaze at the eye of a hurricane; soothing before the dismal future envelopes my often ill thoughts like serrated clouds. I welcome it, because of my dreary hermetic life. I am a modern anchorite at worship to his distractions, curious of this youthful woman, rather than to God.

I often imagine seeing her outside a foggy window. Smiling while looking over her shoulder.

It is enough for me, I think, and I hope that she will always be happy long after I am diminished into something lesser than myself.