Lately, the light has been catching her differently.
Or perhaps it is catching me.
I don’t know.
But I have started noticing the small things about her.
The quiet, deliberate turn of her head.
The elegant line of her shoulder beneath a thin linen shirt.
The way she rests her hand on the steering wheel when she drives,
guiding her own machine through the city’s roar
with a cool, unbothered geometry.
The little pause before she answers a question,
and the way her mouth moves when she is trying not to smile.
Things I have no business remembering.
And yet, I do.
I remember the exact shade of her silence.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what her hands would feel like.
And then I laugh at myself,
look away for a few seconds,
and then look again.
I tell myself it is nothing.
That women are beautiful, and there is nothing strange about noticing.
But appreciation usually ends at the eyes.
This feels different.
There is a softness to the way my attention settles on her.
The gold against her skin when she turns,
the lingering trail of her perfume in the evening breeze,
the tiny crease that appears beside her mouth when she smiles.
I find myself wondering what she looks like when she has just woken up.
Whether she needs the morning silence first,
or if she laughs before she even opens her eyes.
Whether she steals the blankets.
Whether she knows what her eyes do to people.
Whether she knows what they do to me.
Sometimes, the thought feels less like curiosity
and more like wanting.
A quiet, heavy wanting that doesn’t make a sound,
sitting beside me while I pretend to be paying attention to something else.
The kind of wanting that makes you wonder what would happen
if she leaned closer.
If her fingers brushed mine on the edge of a table.
If I stopped looking away.
I imagine sitting beside her in the passenger seat.
The windows down, the music low,
her hand resting near mine on the console.
I don’t know where we are going.
I only know I wouldn’t mind if the drive lasted forever.
And somewhere between these thoughts, I lose the thread completely.
Because I have never met her.
Not technically.
But I can’t seem to stop falling for her.
And when I picture the shape of her smile,
I find something almost embarrassingly familiar.
Something close to home.
I don’t know what that means.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe everything.
But lately, when she walks into a room, something in me goes still.
And I look.
Not quickly.
Not accidentally.
I look.
And sometimes I catch myself wondering what it would be like to be loved by her.
Then I wonder what it would be like to love her.
And I haven’t quite decided whether I want to look away.
