Of Birds and Battles

When I saw her again after three years, I fell in love. She did not catch my attention because she was particularly beautiful. If anything she had always been kind of plain. It was what I saw her doing that made me freeze. It was her dancer’s legs doing a final grand jeté off of the highest building she could get to the fastest, which just so happened to be my old apartment building from when I still lived in the city, and from when I still thought about doing what she was doing. It was the way she did an almost pirouette as she plummeted, and I will not say “as she fell” because that would make it sound like it could have been an accident, and it was the opposite of an accident, she knew what she was doing. The local news went on and on about how witnesses said she looked almost like a bird, said she almost flew, but she was not just a bird. She was a bird and a ballerina and a battle weary soldier, bloodied and bruised from years of wars that she couldn’t quite win. Wars to claim the territory in her mind that was never meant to be anything but her’s.

When I say that I fell in love with her, I don’t mean in the way that I love my family or my friends, or the person I have not yet married, or the children I have not yet had, but that I loved her the way I wish I used to love myself. I loved her in that I wished I was back in my old apartment if only for a minute, even though thinking about it still sometimes sends me into a panic, if only to reach through my always open window and catch her as she fell and let her rest on my shoulder the way my best friend does when the world gives him a moment to just stop, just rest. I loved her in that I wanted to let her just stop, just rest. I loved her in that I would have given anything to be there with her to tell her that someone did.