she was a bird, kind of. The kind that was easy to free, you know those ones you hear outside your window on a late spring afternoon, when the sky isn’t quite yet pink but you know it will be soon, and it’s kind of a sad time.

She’s that kind of bird – the little plain brown ones that wait on the trees and suddenly you look out and it’s staring at you, giving you this sort of look that goes, “I know what you are doing and I can see you, deep inside you.” It’s sort of chilling,

but it gives you a warm feeling too, until the tips of your toenails, and you feel very stuffy.

She was that kind of bird. She would often just sit there next to you while you were drawing something, with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward. And you would lose all focus of what you were drawing and realize that whatever it was, she would be twenty times more interesting to draw.

So you would casually flick your notebook to a new page and contemplate a few sketch marks, outlining her jaw – and what a jaw. And you would just stare at that jaw and the curve you drew on your paper, and they would look nothing alike. But you hate erasing, but you hate what’s on the paper, and you just can’t take it and you get all frustrated and all the while she’s just sitting there with her hand under her chin, legs crossed, leaning forward, and you mean to jump a little and stand up and stare at her directly in the face,

but you realize that wouldn’t be so nice. And you realize you’re acting slightly stupid, so you keep your poise and take off your shoes and socks, and it’s so nice by the fountain so you dip your toes in a little bit.

Then she turns her head a little too quickly toward you when she notices your toes in the water, and you turn toward her, surprised. She searches your face, your eyelashes, your hands, sighs and leans backward and lies down on the cement, her shirt stretching up a centimeter or two above the waistband of her pants, exposing a white thin cookie piece of her belly.

And then you want to draw her belly, except you can’t see her bellybutton which is the main part, and you get more frustrated, and all the while she’s just lying there staring up at the sky, with her legs uncrossed and her arms splayed out to either side of her, and all the while her blue and brown jacket is – oh no, she’s taking it off, oh no, and now you want to draw her arms except you can’t because you’ve pretty much just proven to yourself within the last few minutes that you can’t draw her at all. It’s so impossible, so you just don’t even open your mouth, and the water is making the bottoms of your toes wrinkly and it’s actually a little cold, so you look at her hair.

So you look at her hair rolled out clumsily on the cement and it’s beautiful, and it’s so unfair what she is, and you don’t even know what to do with yourself.