Aries

Laura Sass

He stood there, with rain pouring from the sky, temporarily highlighted by the passing headlights. His every feature glowed as if lit by some internal fire. When in profile, his long Roman nose was what survived in memory, but when viewing him straight on, it was his eyes. His eyes looked straight through you, exploring every inch of your soul, every crevice of your heart. A girl stood in front of him, her long hair covering most of her face and obscuring her features. While he seemed unaffected by the rain, she was shivering violently. By the way she grabbed his arm, it was obvious that she was desperate for something. He looked at her tenderly and stroked her hair, drawing it away from her neck. A face emerged, one that was too intelligent to be innocent but too optimistic to be jaded. He spoke to her in the kind of voice that you hear inside you, with your heart. At the sound of his voice her shivering instantly ceased. They stood without talking, without touching, and just gazed at each other. An internal war was being waged inside each of them, the kind that could not fail to engender casualties. With great effort, he broke the connection. Through the thick curtain of sleet and rain, he turned away and started walking slowly. The fire went with him, leaving her in darkness. At his departure, the girl sank to the pavement, shivering once again.

He was different once. The flames were always there, but not the immediate need for action. She was burned, but others were scorched; it drove them away. He was very much alone. She would have followed him anywhere. But now he would not allow her to.

They had never lived together, but sometimes it felt like it. She would travel to his tiny apartment every weekend just to see him, to connect his face to his voice. The thermostat was broken, so it was always sweltering. She jokingly said to him that visiting him was like taking an expedition to a different country, one with a rain forest. Regardless of the temperature, she always slept with her head on his bare chest, cuddling as close as possible to him for some of his warmth. No matter how hot the apartment was, she was never truly warm until she was beside him.

Sometimes he drew her. Once he drew her in various positions for twelve hours straight. Although she felt honored, she always felt a little uncomfortable. And seeing the final product was always terrible.

“I don’t look like that,” she would say. The girl in the picture seemed to leap off the page. Her paper and pencil eyes and body seemed more alive then the model’s, although composed of flesh and blood. he girl with the smoldering eyes and lifted chin seemed to have a confidence, a knowledge, that she could not understand. He would study her and then study the picture as though he hadn’t just drawn it.

“You will,” he said, every time.

She would always remember the first time he told her that he loved her. It was in that very apartment, the one she would always consider theirs. They were resting on his bed. He was clad in only a pair of boxers, while she had on only an old t-shirt of his. She had just finished singing, as she would spontaneously do now and again, when she looked at him and was ensnared in his eyes.

“What?” she said hesitantly. “What are you looking at?” A small smile crept up to the sides of his mouth.

“You,” he answered. “I love you, you know. I probably always will. It’s odd.”

“Odd?” she said, her initial joy at his words turning to defensiveness and confusion. “How can it be odd?”

“I just didn’t think I’d love you,” he said simply. Before she could bristle at his words, he added, “But somehow I do. More than I’ve ever loved anything or anyone else.”

But less than a year later they would be standing in the rain. She knew it was coming, but had tried to drive it away with her embraces and fevered kisses. She tried to scare it away with the strength of her devotion for him. He had warned her.

“I need to do something,” he would say. “I need to do something great, something important.”

“Then let me come with you,” she pleaded. “I want to do great things too.”

“You’re needed here,”” he told her. “It’s all set for you. I’m the only thing

in.your life that isn’t planned.”

She had cried and she had begged, shamelessly, for him to choose her over his

dreams, hating herself for asking him to give up something so important, knowing that he

couldn’t.

She stayed crouched in the grime until she could no longer see his face in dreams or memories. She walked up into his apartment, weaving through the empty paint cans and blackened candles until she found what she was seeking. She closed the door behind her as she left, the last picture he had drawn of her in her hand. As she walked to her car, the rain stopped. It was finally clear ahead of her, although behind her the building burned bright red and the clouds of smoke pushed her further away from the world she had once existed in, towards a world she could not yet fathom.