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Beyond This

I watch the girl who reads each day at the back of the classroom. All her friends sit in a bunch on the other side of the room but she, rushing in two minutes late with her nose buried in a book, drops absentmindedly into the seat next to me. She sits at the back of the room working on her chemistry notes, simultaneously and flawlessly answering questions about classic literature. She hasn’t read these works in preparation for the class. She read them years ago and they are now gently sweet with nostalgia to her memory. These works, they are old friends to her, so well known that she doesn’t have to reread them. She reads a book only once or a million times. Either way she feels it so thoroughly that she knows it, inside and out, years later. She is a renaissance woman. She is a scientist. Her imagination, bolstered and strengthened by her passionate journeys to other lands through her favorite novels, carries her far away from me to better places with better people. In the space of a class period she has flown through the sky and trekked through the Amazon and looked over the Seine while sipping a café au lait. In the space of a minute, she has traveled to space and back. She is sister to the elves, cousin to the mermaids, friend to the dragons, and seer to the centaurs. She is the witch. She is the sorceress. She is Morgana le Fay. She is Circe and Grimhildr and Hermione Granger. She is like smoke, no mortal man can touch her. I’ll see her again perhaps years from now. She will be different. She will have the marks of a full life. I will be the same. I can’t understand her. She is not exactly pretty, yet somehow she is beautiful. So beautiful it seems impossible that she exists on the same plane as the rest of us. Her eyes, constantly searching, meet mine for an instant and dart away just as quickly. In that moment I see in the dark chocolate depths of her eyes that she has seen a million heroes and a million homes, a million firesides and fire-breathing dragons, a million wars and a million wishes on stars. And then I realize it. I am one small star in a galaxy within her mind. Reality, this reality, is just one galaxy in a whole universe to her. I see her life flash by in photographs. As Lewis Carroll said “Shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings”. Pine trees, oak trees, holly and redwood. She climbs mountains, explores cities, watches plays and symphonies. She looks through microscopes and telescopes and falls in love and has her heart broken. She heals, cries a million tears, runs through the grass barefoot in the middle of the night, dances in the light of the moon, takes deep breaths in the early morning, breaks down at two in the morning sometime in October, sings songs in an empty room, goes to a land of dragons and magic and a family all her own. She treasures stories. She fills her heart with the nectar of the gods and fills her soul with divine ambrosia. I wish I could have her. I wish I could be like her. But she deserves a soul dotted with starlight to match her own. She deserves a heart shining with the pearly sheen of moonlight on water to match the iridescence of her own. How I wish I could be a part of that beauty. How I wish I could be he that she revolves around, as I revolve around her.

Inspired by “You Should Date an Illiterate Girl” by Charles Warnke for Thought Catalog

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

Midnight Velvet and Tulle

A blur of midnight blue, she dashed past the brick building, and across the muddied field. She flung herself at the chain link fence, clinging onto the cold metal with emerald-tipped fingers, as if to a lifeline. He could see her shoulders shake beneath the velvet bodice of her dress, though her face was hidden, facing the salt marsh. Her long, dark hair tumbled down her back in wild disarray and her skirts rustled in the cold evening. He could almost feel the hopelessness and despair rolling off of her in waves. Without warning, she whipped around and in her eyes he saw not only sadness but rage and a sort of exhaustion, for she was one who had become weary of the world. She paused, noticing the red-haired man. The berry blossom of her mouth stiffened. He saw, from the moment she noticed his presence, the shift like a film over her eyes, back to the haughty, brusque, efficient woman the world knew. He hoped that she would read his apology in his eyes, but she merely tossed her dark tresses, lifting her chin back up, and breezed past him, with the collected dignity that was her armor. He had not a clue the nature of his transgressions, but she was not one to be hurt so easily, and it made him uneasy.