hill first to see the sun rise. When she moved she danced, her feet never
seeming to touch the floor. She just sort of floated. Floated around with
me chasing after, stepping where her feet never landed.
Now she stood in the doorway with a few pages of paper clutched to
her chest.
“We ran out of ink.”
“Okay.”
“Can you get some more?”
I sighed. “Alright. Later, though.”
“Okay. Thanks, Isaac.” After a beat, “I’m writing a story.”
“About what?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how to end it, though.”
“Why are you ending it?”
She shrugged and picked up a post-it note from the counter. More
ink, she wrote, then left it there and turned toward the steps.
Curiosity got the best of me as I wondered what she had written
about. Maybe snow. Born and raised on the West Coast, she had never
seen snow before her time in New York. One night after a party, as we
stumbled home, our visible breath started to mix with the light flurries
that deadened the street and nestled in her hair. She tilted her face up
and her eyelashes fluttered as the flurries fell into her eyes. She took
her coat off and stretched out her burned arms from her visit home last
weekend, peeling back to reveal new, pink skin. The snow fell against her
arms, melting immediately into droplets of water against her overheated
skin. After a few minutes, her arms became dotted with more and more
water droplets, and the streetlight on the corner revealed that the flurries
had yielded to drizzle. When we got home, she had stripped down and
gingerly climbed into my bed and settled onto her side. The sun had
burned her back that past weekend. She tossed and turned every night all
week. She would usually sleep on her back, with her head turned toward
the window. I would wake up at night and see the glow from the moon
hitting her face in a way that made me want the sun to never rise again.
But of course it always did, and she would drag herself out of bed and
sit down at her computer, claiming that she had her best ideas in the
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