She is transient and belongs to no one. It is an odd feeling, being around her. The air is electric, crackling with the possibility of being able to reach out and touch her. She is right there and yet if you reached for her your hand would close on empty air. It is as if her form is constantly in flux between here and somewhere else. No one can hold her, and she can be tied to nothing. She is only herself and being dependent on someone else makes her feel like she is suffocating. She can't breathe, she is drowning in their need and the expectations she cannot possibly fulfill. Because she is transient and belongs to no one.
There is a tall, leonine man standing in the doorway of the darkened room, half in shadow. He is watching her stir fitfully in her sleep, moving with strong limbs, gracefully, as if moving underwater. She might as well be. She was far beyond his reach, always swimming away, always laughing. Her hair is spread out against dark blue cotton sheets. She is always laughing, always concealing that fact that he can never have her. But that is what he likes best about her, what you all like best. She can never really be caught if she wants to evade your grasp. She just slips out of your hands, twisting her body back into the sea of herself, swimming away, laughing. She becomes a fixation, a goal. And when she lets you catch her, trusts you with her name and her secrets, you no longer want her. She is no longer mysterious, no longer glimmering, no longer something to be won. You can no longer idolize her and imagine her to be whatever you want because now she is real. She is trapped and she is fragile and she is scared and she is not what you expected.
The lean man watching her understands and accepts this. He understands that the more you don't want what she can give to you, the more she swims away. The faster she swims away, gleaming just under the surface, the more you will want what she can never give you. She will not be made vulnerable. She is a fortress of herself and no one else is needed.
He sees through the illusion but does not try to change her. He will brave the deceptive violence of the waves and catch her before she can turn around and grin at him through her mass of hair. He will catch her before she becomes an enigma. She will be free from this trap of her own making.
She is like a child emotionally, though she knows how to use her body to make music come out of men's mouths.