Her name was Everest, like the mountain her father conquered. It was a perfect name for her, I think. The way she danced to bops and beats was like a fierce wind, and yet she could not be more solid in what she believed. She understood that the world revolves, not around the Sun, but the people that die and live. 'From the moment we are born,' she said, 'it falls to us to carry the world with billions of other hands.' And I believed her, just like always.
When I first caught sight of this anomaly, she was wandering around the stairs below my loft. I could say that she was a vision, that I loved her before I even knew her name, but that wasn't the case. Sadly, I thought she was like every other twelve-year-old in the era. I expected her to pull out a cell phone and speak in a vernacular that no one above the age of twenty could comprehend. I had yet to know that she had never owned a mobile phone, or that she had never understood the language of her peers. She was a treasure I had to dig for, so to speak.
For a week, when I came home from work she would be next to my stairwell, humming a low tune like a lullaby. I stole glances, and every now and again, outright stared at her. She always just smiled and nodded her head in greeting, as if standing below a stranger's home was the normal thing to do. I did not question her. I was afraid that if I talked to her, I would be thrown in jail for something I didn't commit. Ironically, during the first two weeks of her presence, she became a sort of bad omen. I thought I must certainly have terrible things coming my way, for a girl that wore doll-like outfits to be stalking me. That was another thing. Her outfits were always matching- she had a sweater, skirt, tights, and shoes as if her mother dressed her. She was a porcelain doll with a music box and a greeting card.
I knew the day I finally met her that something big would happen. Her voice didn't carry across the complex when I entered, and when I came onto the landing I only saw a ghost of where she had been. I thought perhaps she had only ever been an apparition, a mere trick of my lonesome mind. I thought that it was over, and that the tune she sang would finally fade away. When I opened my door, however, and heard the clatter of a falling chair, all of my hopes were torn. Across the loft from me, standing rather awkwardly next to the kitchen table, was the girl I believed had disappeared.
As I caught her eye, she lowered her head and bit her lip, blushing from the freckles on her cheeks to the tips of her fingers. I would have thought she was adorable had she not been in my home. She muttered an apology and looked everywhere but at my face. This seemed awfully out of character for the smug little doll I had come to fear.
I asked her why she came to my apartment. I didn't ask who she was, or what she was doing, but why she was there. It was the least blunt of the three, said purely on instinct, and seemed to be the right choice. She answered me. So quickly, in fact, that my brain lagged a minute behind in function.
She was lonely. Her mother traveled and left her behind. She always had wanted to paint. She smelled the acrylics on the landing below when she moved in. She was curious and wanted to know me. She wanted to learn. That was all.
I held sympathy for her suddenly, as if the story and the heat radiating from her mortified skin were a fairy that made her human. I agreed to give her lessons, but only if she would stop haunting my stairwell. We had a deal.
The first couple of days were less than progressive. I was afraid to touch her and she blushed at everything I said. It made me wonder if we should just go back to being the struggling artist and the girl who broke into his apartment while he was away. At least then she didn't look like a petunia in an evergreen outfit. At the end of our second session I had to put an end to it. Either she learned how to be confident, like my first impression of her, or I would buy a padlock for my door. I told her that. She looked near tears. I forced her outside for ice cream.
During the walk to the ice cream parlor we talked about me. I told her about my job at the gallery, wishing to be near great art since I could not make my own. She said my art, which aged in piles around the loft, was beautiful. I glanced at her but said nothing. I didn't want her to blush again. Turning red that much in one day, I thought, must be painful. I continued to tell her about my mother, who had passed away the year before. I told her about my lack of friends, and abundance of acquaintances. She didn't say a word after her first comment.
I ordered two chocolate vanilla swirls on sugar cones. I didn't know if that was what she wanted, but she didn't complain. When we left I asked her why she couldn't go with her mother around the world. Her mother was selfish, she said, and didn't want her after her father died while cliff jumping. He liked an adventure, and taught her everything she needed to know before he passed away. I doubted this. What middle school kid knew everything? Not even the genius ones, who made it to college before puberty, knew everything.
She veered off course suddenly, walking across the street. I followed her, encouraged by her sudden leap of confidence. She twirled around on mulch, licking the ice cream in her hand. I ate my own in silence, watching her explore. Eventually, she started talking again. She said words that caught me by surprise. She talked of life and hands and passing on. At first she sounded like she was on something, and I actually asked her if she had hash brownies for dinner. She didn't know what they were, of course, and continued on. She ranted and rambled for an hour, a flush of pride growing on her face instead of embarrassment. Then in her fever, I saw who I knew she was. I saw passion and truth in the form of outstretched arms, as her empty cone lay forgotten on the ground. I saw beauty seep from her and felt my mind begin to change.
From then on our sessions never went to waste. I had cracked her red mask, and ever since she continuously astonished me. I taught her the brush strokes and the different types of paint, but it's what she painted that surprised me. Once, I asked her to paint a landscape, just a simple one with a sky and grass. I left her alone to do it while I made us hot cocoa, the weather being even colder than the early autumn norm. A good ten minutes later, I set the filled mugs on the coffee table and went to check on her. What she had done left me out of breath. The grass was a fire and the sky a hazy cloud of smoke. The sun she had added in was bright as it should be, but she made it a white sparkle peeking through the darkness. I was not expecting that, and I told her so. But also, it was powerful. And it was only a small part of who she was.
Teaching her became my joy. During those times I not only taught her how to paint, but also how to do the math equations in her homework and how to cook. I taught her things that her parents never had. Her father showed her how to live, but it was left to me to teach her survival. It turned out that her mother had been supplying her with money, but a girl who had never lived alone before wasn't fit to use it correctly. I showed her how to manage it, helped her buy groceries, and-embarrassingly enough for the both of us-helped her sort her laundry. I became her caretaker, and I wasn't complaining.
Another part of the occupation, though, was the holiday season. She had come two months before Christmas, and between paying for necessities and paints I was dwindling in the money department. So I decided early on to make her a gift-a painting. I spent hours thinking of what to paint her. I knew that she loved butterflies, life, strawberries, and the Beatles, but everything I thought of wasn't good enough. Nothing was good enough for her. On Christmas Eve I was more than a bit dreary. I was certain that she had bought me something and I had nothing in return. She poked me in the sides all evening to try and get me to laugh, but she only succeeded twice. Eventually even she called it a lost cause and decided to go to sleep, making me promise a better attitude in the morning.
So that she wasn't alone on such a holiday, I convinced her to stay the night and sleep on the couch, and after her frustration with me earlier, I decided to turn the lights off after she settled under the green comforter she had brought up from her room. I could not sleep, however. For an hour I meandered around my apartment aimlessly, before settling on a stool between the couch and an empty canvas. At first I stared at the canvas, urging it to become something amazing, and then I heard a shuffle from the couch behind me. I turned around to look at her. She was still small, but so much different. Her long brown hair was loose from clips and fell over her face carelessly. Her arms and legs were engulfed in nightclothes too large for her and not at all doll-like. Seeing her that way, it almost seemed impossible that I had once thought of her as something perfect and untouchable. In that moment, watching her breathe gently under a moonlit shadow, I came to a realization. I loved her. Not in a way that a man loves his wife or in a way a brother loves his sister, I just simply loved her. It was an almost overbearing emotion to come to terms with, and it-most importantly-inspired me.
In the morning I was a little more than weary. I woke her up at nine with Christmas music and a small breakfast. She was groggy until she realized what day it was. After that I couldn't get her to settle down. But it was Christmas, she told me, and people everywhere were feeling powerful emotions all around the same time. I threw her a look that should have effectively stated that I could care less what people were feeling, she needed to eat her breakfast. She didn't get the message and after five minutes of telling her to finish her eggs, I surrendered and let her go. She ran down to her apartment, comforter in tow, and didn't come back for two hours. I vaguely wondered if I should be worried. I didn't know what other people were living in the building and a psycho could have picked her up easily. I wasn't dwelling on it long, though, before I heard her come back up the stairwell.
She entered the loft shyly, a stereo in her hand. I was dumbfounded at the sight of her outfit. She was covered in white from her barrettes to her sleeveless dress to her tights to her ballerina shoes. I was not aware that she could dance and took a moment to get over the shock. I had never seen a ballerina with her hair down, I told her, and she glared at me while finding a place to plug in the stereo. I moved furniture and paintings out of the way as she fiddled with the CD player, and when I finally sat back down on the couch, she was tapping her finger impatiently on the play button. I hid a smile behind folded hands and rested my elbows on my knees. Seeing that I was ready to pay attention, she started the song.
It wasn't what I expected. Instead of an orchestra, I heard soft beats and fabricated notes followed by a melodic voice pursuing the rhythm and sound. She danced passionately and gracefully, portraying the sorrow hidden under the cheerful tones of the song. One of the few times I saw her was in that moment. I saw her in what she loved and cared for, and dancing seemed to be near the top of the list. As the song ended, she stopped and looked up at me expectantly. It was beautiful, I told her, and she smiled. I couldn't find a hint of a blush on her face.
We worked through another month, her paintings and lifestyle steadily becoming better. As she became more independent, I saw a little less of her. She could mostly manage on her own halfway through January, and had nearly mastered skills she should not have needed until after high school. I was livid that she was mistreated in such a way, but I was also grateful. She brought some light into a world of black and gray. So one can imagine how utterly disappointed I felt when it was time for her to leave.
In the beginning of February she ran into my loft in a fit. I was already tired from work and resting on the couch, so I was helpless to stop her from making a beeline to some of her latest paintings and tearing them apart. After assessing the situation and realizing that she had a knife on her, I grabbed hold of her from behind and pulled her away. She immediately dropped the weapon and before I could blink, buried herself into my chest, muttering nonsense as she cried. Later, after calming her down with a marshmallow and peanut butter sandwich, I learned that her mother didn't want her to live alone anymore. She would be joining her mother in France the next day, her things being transported soon after. She would be traveling the world, and I would be left here, alone.
She spent the night at my apartment, just as she had on Christmas. I made sure to give her my address and promised to notify her if I ever moved away myself. The next morning a cab picked her up from the front of the building. It was as simple as that. I didn't steal her away or fight for her. I just walked her down the stairs and out into the cold, giving her a hug before she disappeared into an ugly, yellow car.
Nothing ended for us when she moved. It wasn't as if she had died, she had just…gone away. She sent me post cards and letters from different places, always explaining the ordinary beautiful things. At some point she became a teenager. It wasn't awfully apparent until she told me that she had a boyfriend. She said she loved him and than a week later left him for reasons I didn't care to ask. She was a fickle thing in those days.
I had girlfriends and just friends after she left, but I never loved any of them as much. I spent most of my days painting from the fading inspiration and monotonously carrying out my job at the gallery. It would be seven years of written words before I would see her again and for the last time. I had developed an illness somewhere down the line and by the time they found it, they said I was dying. I hid it from her until two weeks before they said I would pass. It was the hardest of my letters that I had ever written. I was certain that I would never see her, but she had never been the predictable one.
Wheezing through my last day, I tried to stay awake as long as possible. I knew for a fact that if I fell asleep, my eyes would never open. It wasn't a sense of fear keeping me still, but rather a waiting. Some part of me said to wait. And then she came through the sterile room door.
It was odd seeing her in a t-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back into a half-ponytail. She looked like any other person, not the fire I knew she was inside. She cried and scolded me for keeping such a thing from her. She told me that she almost hadn't come, because her finals were that day. She took them early just for me. I listened to her go on like she used to, though her voice was laced with despair. I wished that I had called upon her sooner and that we could have spent more time together like we had when she was smaller. I felt so guilty for not using time, and yet there was something I had to say. 'I'm handing you the world,' I told her. She would receive all of my paintings, including the ones of her I had painted ever since that Christmas night. She was my inspiration. My Everest. And her wet, smiling face, was the last and most beautiful thing I saw in my lifetime.
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Author's Blab: This is the first thing i've posted on here in ages that isn't poetry. I wrote this for creative writing class, and needed some place to store it so that my friends could have a looksie. This site comes in handy, eh?
Oh, and before I get scolded-I know that lack of dialouge ruins the story for some people, but in this little clipit it was done on purpose. This was actually meant to tell the story, not so much show it.