The Only Thing I Really Care About

I would be immensely proud if I could find the words to describe Lilly. I've drawn a lot of portraits, but I would never attempt to draw hers. I feel like the most important thing about her is something beyond description - a strange kind of charisma, if you will. Everything she does is part of a larger, even more interesting story that is her life. I'm drawn to every word that tumbles out of her mouth. She writes beautiful poetry, too. It's not really like anything I've read before. I want so terribly to be in every part of her life, and I feel like even then, she'd be a mystery to me.


I thought about these things a lot this afternoon. I spent it with her (but let's be honest, I spend most of my time with her). We wasted most of the afternoon smoking cigarettes by the window in her room, trying to blow all the smoke out of her window. We'd put on some terrible daytime show on her little 23" TV. We made jokes about it, half out of our heads. Dr Phil seems terribly overdramatic in such a mindset.
Suddenly, she turned the volume down and looked at me, grinning. "I'm going to get on Dr. Phil," she told me.
"How?" I asked. She tried to keep a serious face, but the corners of her mouth were twitching.
She picked up her pack of cigarettes, Winstons this time (we smoke whatever we can get our hands on - no brand loyalty here) and she pulled out a handful. Before I could say anything, she'd stuck them all in her mouth at once.
"Dr. Phil, I have a smoking problem," she said to me, as I were the doctor himself. She couldn't smile, her mouth was so full of tobacco rolls. "One just isn't enough anymore!" As she said this, one of the cigarettes fell out of her mouth. "If I don't smoke at least ten of these fuckers every hour on the hour, I just go crazy!" Two more fell out just then. "Oh lord, I'm getting a craving!" She grabbed her lighter then and tried to simultaneously smoke the seven or so cigarettes remaining in her mouth. She failed at lighting a single one, and she dropped them all in laughter.


I'm hoping that might help explain why I want her with me every minute. When she does things like that, I want to grab her and tell her how beautiful, how adorable, she is. And believe me, it's not just on the inside - she has the most adorable pout, curly red hair that she stubbornly insists on straightening, she's curvy enough to be unbearably soft, the perfect size to fit into a bed with. I think about telling her all the time. But I would risk losing her. I couldn't take that; I'm afraid I'd just shatter if she were suddenly gone. I swear that half the cigarettes I smoke are wasted on thinking about how I'm completely unable to say a single thing to her.