A Girl in Pink
She wore a dress of cherry blossoms and painted pomegranate across plump, caramel lips. Lace slippers covered anxious feet and spurts of wildflower ambrosia traced along her neck and down her arms, ending at glittering fingertips. The night was young, and so was she.
The moon blew kisses to her through the summer wind that danced against flushed cheeks. Stars giggled at their cherished love affair and the clouds hitchhiked across a sky she sometimes called her own.
Opal swirled in wide eyes and memories of mint and chocolate lingered in her mind. The taste of birch beer hid in the corner of her lips. A gift she would taste later.
Below the world twinkled in magic and ambiguity. That city could be anything you wanted, if you had the time and energy to make it so. And she did.
People of lands and ages she had not yet experienced watched as her smile met with a world where hate breeds better than love could ever dream. Kindness was a strange thing here, and in the pale-yellow light of physicality, she was an oddity.
They wrote about cigarettes and late-night kisses, in those books she read. Milky skin and tear stained notes were the only things tortured poets could figure were worth writing about. It was interesting, she agreed. But what about this? What about living and loving the fact that you can breathe just fine and feel the chill of rain, even if the reality of being cold and wet is unsatisfactory? And why should it be? Somewhere there are warm clothes waiting for you.
Against the melodic chaos of the night, someone was playing the guitar in a certain kind of way that pulled at the strings connecting her heart and her soul. So she ran.
Blurred visions of pastries in crystal cases and dresses of the deepest burgundy flew past as her ears carried her feet and the night seemed to come alive. A beating heart disguised in that rhythm was bleeding into the streets and her lungs were inhaling the breath of that city. It smelled of fryer oil and bread, incense and rotting eggs. And it felt like home.
At a square covered in sunshine yellow daffodils and snow-white Cherokee roses, there sat a boy with a guitar on a sun bleached milkcrate. She stopped in the shadows, afraid that a whisper from her would ruin what it took the whole world to create. This boy and this song. He was young with a smile that puffed up his cheeks and rounded the bottom of his eyes, which were closed in tender captivation. She knew that even after he stopped playing, this song would continue to cycle within his veins and through his mind. This song was and always would be him.
Softly, the girl dressed in pink inched away from the shadows and into the light where the tune from the guitar could wash over her like a warm July rainstorm. Lightening flashed and thunder rolled on, the taste of wet grass gliding atop her eager taste buds. That is what she imagined his kiss to taste like.
The rhythm slowed, but her heart beat just as fast and as the song ended, she could feel his eyes open and lock onto her, even though her own eyes were cemented shut and images of dewy forests and clover-ridden meadows danced behind the thin skin of her eyelids.
Palms began sweating and the two existing among hours and the cries of car brakes could feel that the love they had felt for a city made of stone, had become stretched like a rope. It lassoed around a girl who lived unapologetically and a boy who could play with cords of his heart and paint the world with dreams. And together they smiled