She leaned her head lazily against the grimy wall. Weak sunlight filtered between the window blinds to illuminate the kitchen stained by old smoke and old memories. "This morning I woke up alive," she said.
I didn't reply. I never had anything to say to her that she hadn't heard before. I was always too busy trying frantically to absorb her through my eyes. Her beauty was compelling because it was balanced on a razor's edge. Her eyes were deep: both brimming full with secret messages and sunken in with hidden pain. Her skin was so pale that it was translucent; every movement she made was slow and languid. And everything about her impressed an overwhelming urgency on me.
A smug smile curled its leisurely way over her mouth. "I'm tired of sleeping, it's such a waste of time," she sighed.
I thought her eyes looked afraid as they fluttered shut and she glanced away. She never could meet my gaze for more than a moment. In a blink she suddenly seemed impossibly far away. It was there in the way she looked right through me and seemed to be regarding something that I could never see. In the way that she hunched over in the chair and rested her elbows upon the table, cradling her head in her hands. She studied the table top intently for a few moments and then her eyes again met mine and her stare was startlingly penetrating.
"I worship you, you know," I said to her.
She scrutinzed me for several moments more, her face very solemn and her demeanor withdrawn. Then an unexpectedly childish pleasure lit her features up. "Let's go somewhere," she said. Her moods always did change faster than lightening.