Somewhere off in the distance his mother calls. “No, I’ve only just met her”. He sits up, and pressed the button in the middle of the clock, not the sleep button, but the one that turns the alarm off. This allows him to spend as much time as he wants with her. Closing his eyes he reintroduces himself to her. “Who is your friend?” she asks the person driving the van. There are four of them inside this smaller van. The exterior is a light blue, and the interior is gray. Both are light up by the light yellow filling the outside world. The whole van only contains space for four, each an individual seat. His friend is driving, and in the passenger seat is her. “I’m Steve”. He leans over her chair, as she is sitting in front of him, and sees her face from above. She has black wavy hair that frames the upper half of her face.
He recalls one time that he was inside an art showing. There is one painting, filled with colors that he had only seen in his dreams. He stares for at least 4 hours at the complexity of it, though it only consisted of a few parts. He studies every square inch, trying to memorize it and learn it in his mind and heart forever. Reds dance along side blues and oranges, yellows squeeze in between, and greens cut on top. All of them curve playfully towards the center. The swirl of every color came to a point in towards the middle, where a stroke of white is. That is the only white of the picture, and he thinks it perhaps represented Heaven. Or maybe it represents the pureness of white, and how untainted by any other color it is. Whatever it represented, it was still beautiful to look at. He looks at his own clothes and sees how bland he looked in them, wanting to be dressed up in the colors of the painting. Near the fourth hour of awe, he realizes the beautiful frame of this painting. The frame is made of a darker brown wood. It is as if he is looking right a real tree. Looking back at the painting he does not see artificial colors and paint anymore, he sees something real, something as valid a being as he or the others, who now are of no consequence. His eyes are naturally drawn towards the center of the white. She turns her head back and kisses him lightly on the forehead. She does this so gently, that anyone watching would not even notice the touch, but the touch itself now inflamed his forehead. The flame on his head spirals around and is spread to the rest of his body. His arms holding him above her chair give, and he falls back into his chair, and just simply feels the colors dance around his body.
Walking on the sidewalk with her could have been difficult, as he is watching her the whole time and may trip over something. Nothing, however, stands in his way. He cannot help but study the contours of her face. She has Light green eyes, always hidden by squints. The squinting creates small wrinkles by her eyes, pulling her pink soft cheeks up, making her perfect lips form a half smile. And she is always squinting. Her small ears sometimes make an appearance if a gust of wind blesses her hair, making her smile. The wind is a cool breeze that hums at the ears, and refreshes the face under the sun of July. She turns her green eyes towards him, and the wind stops humming. They stop walking. He turns his head down, feeling embarrassment for having been staring at her for quite some time now. “Steve.” Looking from the tan ground to her face could have killed him right then, if his heart was reliant on stability as his soul. Her word “Steve” rolled off her lips like she has been saying it in love for years. The word makes them an old couple, whom exchange random appreciations, but when their eyes lock, they share what so few only share. The word makes his own name, Steve, become whole. His name has never before been spoken like this. The word makes the seagulls stop flying, and the clouds stand still. In the few seconds between looking at her, when she spoke her first word, he realizes something. He realizes that she is the someone he has always been looking for. He cannot appreciate anything else now, after seeing her, and after seeing inside of her. She is the control point of perfection. Granted she isn’t perfect in a Greek way, or even in a Teen magazine way, but if God had sent anyone down for him to love for eternity, she is it. Everything he has ever hoped for in a person, trust, faith, strong mind, quick mind, sense of humor, and all the things he had never imagined, but has taken a liking to, have come true here. He is comfortable around her as he would be comfortable with nothing else. There is comfort in warm water, but that only is physical warmth. There is comfort in a loving relative, but that is only internal warmth. She finally appears as if she were about to speak. She began to lean forward the same time he did. Their lips meet at the exactly between the middle of them, and remained there. Her arms wrapped around his back, and each touch, each contact of skin, or feeling of skin through the thin shirt she is wearing, will resonate within him for hours to come, even while he is awake. His hands gently hold her head steady, his thumbs against her cheekbones, his index finger barely touching her small but beautiful ears, where even the expected cold of the small looped metal earring is warm. His other fingers entered the labyrinth of her hair, but hoping never to come out.
But they do come out. The moment does stop. She disappears as soon as he awakens. Looking at his alarm, an hour after he previously turned his alarm off. His heart is still warmed, and her image still burns in his mind. She doesn’t exist in real life. He sits up and puts his hands on his face, looking at the ground. “One hour”. He remembers the detail of every second, and for every millisecond they spent together, he can spend thinking about for an hour. But she is not real. He has class in a few hours, and will not see her in these classes. He will not pass her in the street, he will never meet her in real life. “Well, screw real life.” He lies back down and closes his foggy eyes.
