She was clothed in white: the type of girl who wrote poetry as she walked, gentle footsteps leaving a mark on the ground that must have felt so blessed to have been graced by her step. Her mind spun thoughts that burned like starlight that even her cityscape background could not extinguish. Truly, there was nothing dull about her. She could light up a room full of strangers just by walking through; this is not to say that her beauty was distracting, but instead, her presence (not just her appearance but her aura in its entirety) swallowed up every ounce of air left in a room. Bystanders couldn't help but feel it—like for a single moment, they had no breath left in them because every last gasp of air left in the immediate universe was consumed by her ethereal gait.
I once had a theory about her—that she is the moon, for no matter how hard I tried, or how stunning, bold, and beautiful she appeared, the lens of even the most expensive cameras could not capture her. She defied capturing, which seemed odd because she herself was so inexplicably captivating. Her spirit, however, was much too free, and her aura much too large to be confined to any page or screen. Maybe that is how she was always meant to be; maybe photographs weren't meant to capture those moments when she took my breath away, for maybe then they would be tainted, forced to be remembered in shades of ink that could never compete with the hue of a lasting memory.
Maybe it is unfair to trap those moments, like caged doves, onto pages in albums, or folders on screens. Those moments, when we sat across from one another in an intimate café. She folded one leg over the other and scrutinized a book that she read for the third or fifth time. Her glasses slipped gently down the slope of her nose to rest at its delicate point, and her face folded into a grimace, as she undoubtedly empathized with a character, or mimicked some simple movement of an author’s creation. I sat, too distracted by the way the light played upon her freckled cheek, to tend to my own occupations.
Or when we would board a busy train together, necessarily separated by the bustle of the morning commute. I was not meant to capture her absent-minded gaze as her windswept curls jostled back and forth across her collarbone as the train swayed gently, her hands falling naturally into her lap, the sunrise outside the window seeming to single out only her to illuminate. It seemed to me that she had been hand-picked by the steadily rising orb in the early morning sky because she, of all the morning travelers, was the only one who could possibly contain its light.
And she did: she absorbed every touch of light and carried it with her, day and night. She threatened the moon and all the stars with her brightness.
These things were never meant to be captured.
She went through each day leaving the world a little brighter, a little fuller, a little more complete. And even though they never spoke a word in return, I thanked the stars each and every night for aligning in such a way that made it possible that I might know her. That I could be so lucky to have lived in the same world where each day she walked. That I could wake each day to a world filled with her lightness. That I could feel the light that poured from her skin, and see the nearly blinding brightness of her smile.
Still, years after the moon halted in the sky and every spark within her was extinguished, years after her footsteps ceased to grace the ground with their presence, and coffee shops no longer knew her face, I still thank the stars each night and day for once giving me a chance at knowing what it felt like to kiss the moon goodnight.
