Her name was Alexa, and

She had glossy black hair that fell in waves well past her shoulders to sit in mosaics across her back. Her name was Alexa and she was the artistic type – like me, but better – who could do amazing things with lighting and space. I knew it from the first time I saw her walking across the courtyard with her friends, all of them carrying works in progress under their arms, though hers was incontestably the most brilliant. That day she looked tired, as if she’d just broken out of her own painting (a bedroom: soft dawn beams washing their pink-orange radiance on the walls, drooping Syngonium by the windowsill, unfinished ruffled bedsheets), though even in this state she was insufferably beautiful – delicately pretty, punchable, in the same way those fragile glass baubles don’t last a minute in the rage room. 

Her name was Alexa, and we weren’t friends. I didn’t know who she was really, but my stomach seized under my breasts when we talked in class. Sometimes she’d smile at me – yes, at me – to ask me questions which I now couldn’t possibly recall. I’d taken them as a sign from this beloved and starstruck universe that this was my chance to make her fall in love with me, for real this time. When she held me with her eyes, her questions, I’d often felt my torso spasm, and while I was personally frozen, my feet, which were separate from my being, had no choice but to shuffle their nervous selves closer to where she was, sitting and waiting for my (my, my, my) company.

I’d help her with her questions, be too dense to continue the conversation with any substance, she’d thank me and get on with her work, and that was it. She’d slip seamlessly back into a contented murmur with her table friends, all of whom were closer to her than me and therefore probably better. Later in class, she might torture me with this impossible giggle, mechanically looking at me though clearly laughing at something else – or worse, she’d touch the arm of a boy and fiddle with her necklace. In that period of my life, every second I was in Alexa’s presence, within her radius, I was stiff and fiending to be someone deserving of her and simultaneously wanting to be her (yes, the only person worthy of Alexa). It kept me gut-wrenched with the possibility of one more exchange, to occasionally brush my face with her hair, to be stabbed with glints of my mirror in her eyes. These flickers of her utter loveliness were torment. I felt all I could do was roll deeper into the garden of her, the blush daybreak of whatever she’d awakened. She became the permanent tint in my mind; often blurry but always there, moving in my days as the frosted-glass backdrop.

In fact, I’d failed to preoccupy myself with any other thoughts, to such an extent that a few weeks into the semester I’d slipped into a routine. My schedule was to come home, forget about the scant meal prep I’d previously thrown together distracted, do my own readings – of which I was behind and confused (no help for me) – then go to bed and start over in the morning, to be just as automated as every other day I couldn’t see her face anew. The only concept I had of long-term, distant time was the thought of eventually being good enough to properly – actually – ask her out. My plan was to do it once, and perfectly. I started to care about being pretty again, or at least I wanted to care about being pretty, so I started weighing myself like I was fifteen, and counteracting that tenfold by drinking after class. My friends, who were always lovely to me and were disproportionately so during this insufferable time, were pleased to hear me rambling about cosmetic brands for once, or the new bar that’d opened – that is, about anything but Alexa. They were happy to do my makeup and have Tequila Tuesdays with me.

Predictably, she bled into my dreams, but always as the surrealist slice weaved into my otherwise prosaic state… Alexa, faceless though I knew it was her. Alexa as a lifeguard, though we weren’t at a beach. As a sporting coach, forgiving me. A psychic. Once in late August, she was a strange melting liquid that my teenage self tried to save but couldn’t. I watched her seep through my fingertips, stain my school skirt, and absorb into concrete. The latter of which I woke up at four-thirty, dizzy and dry-handed, asking myself hello? What the fuck is wrong with me?

This went on for a couple of months, and I became pretty freakish about it. I was an amateur in starvation and a lightweight in liquor, so combined with my food-and-drink-induced sluggishness, I eventually became irritable. I would do my concealer wrong, or someone would comment on when I was going to be finishing that painting, and if I wasn’t hangry from skipping brunch or hungover from some poor excuse, I was pissed off at the little things. The advice I received, ruthlessly consistent and always in half-jest, did not help: peace of mind this, just ask that, you have three other fucking classes to catch up on, or, whatever please just eat, you’ll feel better after breakfast. In my outrageous paralysis, I responded with an equal severity of refusal and pettiness, and became annoying, dismissive.

Monday nights around mid-semester, I found myself groaning alone in my apartment, having headaches about stupid shit like the next time I had to do the groceries. Alexa became the incessant chore I conceded to but couldn’t answer, and the previous novelty of it became an increasingly corrosive soreness. The amusement of shoved elbows from my friends upon seeing her across the courtyard, or an “oh, that Alexa?” at parties, talking to someone who’d known her. Yes! I should’ve. Should’ve should’ve. Tedious. But the semester rolled on. It took me two hours to study thirty minutes’ material. 

Once, I switched it up; when the spring was getting humid and overripe and I was miserable about her. Having too much to smoke, I ate half my fridge, four-day-old broccoli and potatoes included, and paced my stuffy bedroom wiping my palms on my thighs. The ceiling was too low and the overhead light too stabbingly blue, so to calm the migraine down I turned it off and tried to let the moonlight in instead, but I’d jerked my blinds open so fast they cracked at the railing. I winced and almost punched through my double windowpane, but I controlled myself and breathed and laid down and marinated, lukewarm, sweating. The only thing I could do was comfort myself with thoughts of her: clasping her necklace, sitting with her feet in the river, swinging… I filled my peripherals with her and simmered for hours. She was probably sleeping soundly herself, and, if awake, certainly she was being normal about it, not thinking of me. I masturbated and then cried; I lay there open-mouthed till I was reduced to sleep, the smothering comedown a pity charity. Indeed, I only slept for a while that night, because a few hours later I woke, now overheated and stale, to spring out of bed lest I puke on my humble mattress.

I don’t know how long this would’ve gone on for. We’d actually studied similar degrees, so we would have had a lot of crossover going forward. But I still get shit for it because the last time I’d heard of her she wasn’t in class. She moved to New Zealand I think, and for what I can’t imagine.