5alvani

I let him get under my skin. There wasn't anything terrifically admirable about him. Nothing to explain the unbelievable draw I felt. I remember walking by the big picture window of his apartment and seeing him standing, half naked, playing his guitar. He was tiny, too small for the big guitar. His hair was dirty and disheveled, long greasy strands falling down in his face as he swung his head in time with the music he made. That was the fabled moment of clarity. That was when I knew that there was nothing else I wanted.

The first night, the time when we first met; eight hours sitting together, talking, drinking, playing music, reading to each other for God's sake! I finally left him, the sky turning pink behind the hills, and resigned myself to sleep. I shut off the light, pulled back the sheets of my bed, stopped as I heard a sound against my window. Pulling the curtain revealed his small frame, standing below my window smoking, grinning like a cat. I have a question for you, he called up to me. Why don't you come down so I can ask you?

He wasn't so oblivious. How could he not notice the puppy dog way in which I followed him around wherever he went? He always invited me. He must know, I thought, as I walked the dark wooded path to meet him at the prescribed location, the moon at my side in the day's waning hours. Or the time I drove him to the hidden beach, 4 AM in the surf and the moonlight. How could I have been more clear?

"I have a question for you," I told him finally, dripping wet under the awning as a storm raged at us. "Why don't you come here so I can ask you?" But he wouldn't come in from the rain.