Scratch Beginnings

Her name?

Well her name's actually really hard to pronounce. Back in South San Francisco, back to the fog, the bookstore, my tinkering car. It's Friday, my sister had just dropped me off. I got irritated with her earlier today, because I'm doing everything in my power to get a life, but being so, she has all reason to be disappointed as to how my life is turning out. It's quite encouraging.

Held by the bookstore, was Scratch Beginnings, a book based on a college graduate trying to make it out of being homeless, by choice, and hoping to come out with the American Dream. I've been planning on becoming homeless, actually not planning but anticipating. I've been planning on becoming independant, and readying myself for anything I might have to deal with.

33 pages, 33 pages about being in a homeless shelter. I looked around the bookstore, I really didn't feel like sarging. I was sitting next to little teenage girls, obviously in High School, and felt the pressure of opening them. But, that couldn't lead to anything good. I went along to open a not very attractive girl, who once I saw her face, was probably in High School also, in the astrology book section. In one hand, I have to sarge, in the other hand sarging is a choice. On today's hand, I really want to kiss someone I like. I called Grace and got her answering machine. I called several other fading targets, which ended with the same voicemail sentiments. I was getting antsy.

I left the bathroom, went through the astrology section, and flew past another girl with a very young looking body, but a very sort of, intellegent face. A fascinated face, like the girl's who talk Jane Austen vs Shakespeare, or Whitman's willing persistence to say the same things. It's the same adoring face behind Jamie's personality, Kate, the weirdo's personality, Ani, the poet, beautiful women who's faces have been hovering over books since they've made the decision that books were way more interesting than other social applications. Before I opened her, I knew I was going to fall into desperate infatuation.

I walked past, walked back, I looked at her face, "Hey, are you a Libra?" I know, I'm such a dork.

Immediately she turned her eyes in a quite interested gleam. "No. . ."
"Are you a gemini?"
"No, do you know about moon signs, and rising?"

I felt that ease sink in; as if I had just comfortably drowned. She smiled, and I adored her large saphire eyes. I asked her what book she was reading and she pulled out "Into the Wild." I laughed as I put my book in front of her; we were in the same boat, basically reading the same book with a different story. When a bookseller tended to straightening the books in the area where we were standing, I asked her if she would like to walk around with me. She nodded her head and said sure. She followed me as we wound into the aisles.

She had big feet. Well she looked like she had big feet, chucks, compared to her about 5'4 height. She was wearing skinny pants, with a black sweater dawning psychedelic colors. Her name was a very long three syllable name with some type of under rated European origin, it had about 28 consenants, and like 3 vowels. Really, it had 11 letters altogether. M, which is the name I'll be calling her, talked in a very defensive but very keen way, not in a victim sort of way, but walled off, as if she was hiding something. For one, she wasn't with a friend or her parents, she was with her guardian. She moved from Vermont, and when I asked her why, she dodged the question telling me that she didn't want to say why and that it was a hard question. I asked her how she would feel if she was in a white room, and she said it was a hard question. Very mysterious. She was closed off, but very interested in me that it was encouraging, discouraging, and quite confusing.

We went into the cooking aisle and rated pies from a pie book. She didn't like corn pie, so I said I did. We spent a long time differentiating the coalitions behind the heavy voluptuous brownie army against the diverse, multicultural, cookie army. The brownie army won. When I randomly pulled out the blueberry pie page her face lit up in mouth watering fascination. Before the blueberry rating, all the other pies deserved a score under five that wasn't very optimistic. The blueberry pie itself, she rated as a 7.

I liked her shy, eerie, virgin, naive properties. (Have no idea if she's a virgin) It's like those comedy shows where everyone's laughing except for that one girl in your group. When M smiled, it was like I finally did something right. When M smiled, it was like staring at the sky and finally seeing a shooting star and wondering what just happened. We walked through the aisles to not look at maps, but to talk about where we would go in America while we stood by the map section. We walked through one corner, and stopped by to check in with her Guardian who asked me a few arbitrary screening questions, not exactly selectively scanning me, but trying to keep me interested in her and not her guardianee.

As we sat in the kids section, on the children benches, we talked about movies. I stared into M's face, and I saw Ava. I spent one day with Ava. I called her around midnight and left her company the midnight the next day. I spent 24 hours with her, falling asleep on her couch at 7am and waking up to her in 12noon, with the fog crawling outside the window, as my lips touched her forehead. It was the perfect day. The one day that I would want to live over again and again in my head, over any other day. If everyday was going to be like those 24 hours with Ava, I'd marry her, I'd be set, I'd be happy. Ava faded out of the picture a long time ago, and I'd been staring at M in the wrong sort of way. We talked about her necklace, her ring, read her palm, and talked.

I pulled out my phone, "Do you want to talk some time?" I could feel a broad searing hesitation keeping under her skin. "I mean, I do think-"
"Yes!" she said emphatically interrupting my sentence.

My eyes sucked back into my face and froze that way. She took my phone from my hand and started punching in her name. For a moment, I felt like I knew this girl would be the one I would fall in love with. For a moment I knew how invested I was in her. I knew I was getting ahead of myself when I hugged her by the bookstore double doors letting her go.