She's calm – when you're alone with her, in the trailer, or sometimes simply standing on her front porch, she's calm. She has this way of staring off into the distance; the world passes before her eyes and reflects back and you can see the pieces of a thousand thoughts flying over her expression, but she doesn't share and you don't ask. It's easier to just stand; to leave some things to mystery. And she lets the rain fall in front of her in a translucent curtain, and sometimes the drops land on her nose or bead in her hair, but she never minds. When you pull her to you, she smells like water. The smell is, frankly, intoxicating.
You found her under the water in the tub one day and her blue eyes fixed unseeingly on the ceiling from under her second skin. You pulled her up; water makes you nervous. But she didn't brush the streams from her eyes and she didn't blink, and you realized that you could physically be her knight in shining armour, but you could never be there emotionally. She lives in this world of spikes and pain and sometimes it comes through, even though she hides it well under a veneer of smiles and polished characteristic grace. And you can't fix that – it's just her. She's just made like that and it's sometimes scary.
Never before have you watched someone handle it by themselves. And the real truth is, she doesn't actually handle it. She doesn't always wait for you to figure it out. There are days that she doesn't get out of bed, and George and Izzie tiptoe downstairs and cast worried looks at the ceiling, and she alternately sleeps and stares, the lace window curtains tracing delicate patterns on her delicate face, but she's not a porcelain doll; she doesn't wait for you to pick her up. She has dealt with it for years on her own, not a therapy kid but dying for counseling. And when you don't get that person to listen; when you don't have anyone to talk to but the neighbours' cat that doesn't really get it, either, you learn to just deal.
If you saw her mind; if you had the ability to see into brains instead of just fix them, you'd see a drawstring bag lying in a dark corner. And this is where she hides it. She hides the pain and she hides the issues until the bag won't draw closed anymore and then she lets it overflow. One thing you have learned with her; you can't hold onto water, not even if you cup your hands really tightly. Water always finds a way around and through. Loving her is like cupping water – you only sustain a little at a time.
That's not to say she doesn't love you beyond what she can express. She's a doctor, not a writer. She doesn't have the language to tell you that the bursting feeling in her heart is overwhelming when you flash a smile her way, or that sometimes she misses you so hard at night that she actually feels rubbed raw all over her skin. But you feel it – you feel it and you respond, and you could be forgiven for thinking that she's trying to confuse you. In a way, she is – letting you too far in when you've betrayed her trust a number of times is a dangerous game she's not sure she's willing to play.
But she's more than a hurt individual – she's got such a beautiful mind. She laughs and she runs and turns, beckoning you to catch her; she heads through the dripping trees by your trailer to the silver lake just over the bend in the landscape. With her head crowned in raindrops; with her feet wet and her eyes sparkling, you can forget your troubled history; you forget that anything but now has ever happened. When you kiss her by the water; when you lie in the wet grass because there are hot showers and there are warm blankets for later, you feel the water slide coolly over your skin and warm quickly between the contact of the exposed hands and stomachs and necks. She tongues a drop; she watches the rain slide over your forehead and you suddenly get a flashback of the time in the lake where you came on the sand and the water moved through your hair and when you closed your eyes and reopened them, she was running her fingers through the water and over your chest.
It amazes you that she stands there, all five feet and four inches of her, all one hundred and five pounds, and she owns the whole situation. You can easily take charge but she'll never let down her guard. It's here, in the damp and the grey and the mist that rings the top of the trees, that you realize – she doesn't just tolerate the rain like everyone else in Seattle, whether they've been born and raised here or whether they're transients from other cities. It's a part of her – she embraces it because the sunshine's too bright and you've got enough of that for both of you.
And later, in the bed where you've added an extra blanket to quell her shivering, you bury your nose in her neck and smell the rain like a perfume that scents your whole sheets.
No matter what happens between you, this is why you always come back. This is why you can't imagine feeling this way with anyone else. Loving someone else may bring the sunshine that you crave, but not loving her is like a day without rain.
Everyone needs water.