One Girl Running (the beginning)

I touched her face. Her eyebrows arched high in a constant state of
perplexion, making anyone who met her gaze uneasy about her apparent
inquisition. Her eyes burned deeper and blacker, bearing into the
hidden parts of your mind seeing, knowing, and understanding
everything shoved behind those walls we build, the ones that push us
further and further away from one another. When she looks at you,
really looks at you, you can't help but feel helplessly violated and
unconditionally loved. Violated because she wasn't fooled by your
mechanisms of defense and loved because anything you'd even done,
said, or thought was forgivable. She was powerful like that, she
mattered to people. To me.

Her mother was from India, her father a British Imperialist she said.
He walked in and out of her life, coming when he was bored enough and
leaving when he found something better to conquer. She hadn't seen him
in six or so years but he still wrote. His letters bound neatly in a
stack on her bedside table. I always wondered why she kept such
heartbreak and disappointment so close. She's complicated I suppose.
One of those people who need tragedy to define triumph.

I stared at her, longing to reach inside of her and to solve the
formula. If you look long enough, you might see her beauty only
distracts from the immense pain of her life, detectable only between
smiles and sometimes in the silence that comes after her piercing
laughter. It is there.

She slept now, the sheets rising and falling over the contours of her
smooth limbs. Her hair a garnish to her face, its sleek black strands
scattered like a lions mane, contrasted against the spare white of her
pillow case.

Over her bed hangs a portrait of her past. The handsome husband, his
ethereal wife, their beautiful daughter. Smiles falsely painted on
because they couldn't be real. He was never going to be enough for her
and she was always too much for him. Her intensity approaches the
unmanageable but its allure is irresistible. She was at least ten
years older than me but you'd never know it. I always thought her to
be one thousand times more beautiful than any other woman I'd seen

She said she liked that when she kissed me she could open her eyes and
see herself. And I suppose we could pass for sisters.

I pushed my body against hers, stealing the warmth and willing myself
to sleep but I couldn't. This was a situation I found myself in by
mistake but as everyday passed it became harder and harder to say
goodbye, to leave her behind. Her brokenness is magnetic, her beauty
inescapable and I wanted nothing more than to have her look at me the
way she sometimes did.