Born Losers

May (Her)

Her extremely uncreative final paper was over Poe, a topic she had thought was safe since she hadn't read Poe in almost six years and found him absolutely repellent.

Safer, at least, than Faulkner. Or Shakespeare. Or Milton and Plath and Brontë and Cummings.

The narrator is clear in the fact that his love affair began at a very young age, she typed, but one of the sadder aspects of 'Annabel Lee' is that the narrator then goes on to blame the death of this love on the angels, a naivety which suggests that he has matured very slightly, if at all, since the young age at which the affair began.

She leaned back, her pencil caught in her teeth, and went back to the poem to see if there was anything else that she could try to pretend to be insightful about, and the line jumped out at her:

But we loved with a love that was more than love-

"Ah," she noised, then made it again. "Ah."

She sounded like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, a bitter whimper burning in her throat. Her eyes were clouding over, and every breath hurt, and the memories welled up, stung her like summer wasps. With a blind hand she swept the book off of the desk and buried her head into her hands.

The pain of it never ended, just went on and on and on, like she was eternally caught up in a dance to which she didn't know the steps. She kept thinking that surely she'd wake up with the ache dulled, with the mischievous glint in his eyes lost to time, the curve of his smile, but every day they were just as bright as they had been the day before, on and on and on.

At some point, surely, she wouldn't miss his contagious tangle of laughter, how it had felt to walk a hallway with his hand wrapped protectively around hers; how he could look at her out of the side of his eye and she would know exactly what he was thinking; how every time something hard happened, his first reaction was to comfort.

Before she could catch her breath, another memory stung her square in the heart: the night last spring, before everything had gone wrong. He'd been running solo drills on the soccer field while she sat cross-legged in the grass and watched with a quiet pride. There was a grace to him that always astounded her, something unbearably fluid about how his body could whirl and scoop and flourish, all the while making it seem like it was doing nothing extraordinary at all.

He'd run himself almost into the ground and only joined her once the sun was just barely hanging on, the last slice of light clinging above the horizon.

"You don't have to watch this physical masochism, you know," he'd told her, uncapping a water bottle. He'd downed half of it in three chugs, his throat bobbing smoothly, and then dumped the rest of it over his sweat-mussed head. She had yelped when some of the droplets flew off to hit her on the nose, and he'd grimaced apologetically and leaned over to wipe them off.

"Sorry," he'd said, and before he could draw back she'd twisted her fingers through the collar of his soaked shirt and brought him close, kissed the lips that were salty with his sweat.

"You know how I've been playing Astral Weeks nonstop?" she asked him.

"My ears will never recover."

"Shut up. There's this great line in one of the songs: I will not remember that I ever felt the pain."

She smiled at him and kissed him again.

"That's me," she said, "when I'm with you. No matter what you're doing."

"It would probably be even less painful for you if I smelled better."

"Not a romantic bone in your body," she said sadly, and turned him loose. He had frowned and looked past her thoughtfully, then refocused on her face.