I still remember the first time I saw her. That really isn't what I remember most, though. You can't tell much from looking at someone in the street from a two-story window. I never actually met Lisa... not officially. There was life before her - right up to sitting down on my bed with my new roommate; two minutes later she was screaming in my face about someone I'd never heard of... and then there she was, in my life. No meeting; just invasion.
I met her through that look in Georgina's eyes as her gaze followed mine past the window to the street. I met her through that subtle exchange between her and Daisy, the moment she walked through the door. I may have been the only one who saw her eyes well up when she started screaming about Jamie... but that didn't make it any less real. She had a history with them all, and it wasn't communal, it was personal. And if there was someone she didn't have a history with, she made sure to create one.
I guess that's where I came in.
It's better this way - I'm always in control, she informed me one night as we rummaged around the darkness for our clothes. I don't let anyone fall in love with me.
I smiled, but in the dark, who could tell? I might have even imagined it. No one can control their own heart, I argued sappily, tossing a sock at her, let alone someone else's.
She lassoed me with a sweater and pulled me against her - a common habit that usually set me off into giggles, but this time silenced me faster than the sound of hallway footsteps in the middle of an orgasm.
No one? she echoed. I kept quiet. Watch me.
She didn't talk to me for two days after that. That's how it always went. I never knew why - but it was Lisa, which is enough of an explanation for why I didn't fight it. She'd spend two days flirting with Cynthia and then one evening walk up to me at dinner and slip me an inch of scrap paper that read, "tongue your meds at 10 and I'll tongue something else at midnight." That's how I knew she was over it.
I just never knew what it was she was over.
I suppose that was the problem with us. From the first time I watched her arrive at the ward - maniacal, show-stopping, inhumanly entrancing – to that same night, when I really saw her for the first time, sitting on the floor in the room at the end of the hall; helpless, practically catatonic, finally having surrendered to the examination and probing of the staff. From the first time I had the guts to follow her to bed, shut the door, kiss her, and run back to my own room... to the first night we watched each other from across the TV room, simultaneously slipping our pills into our pockets. Always, from the beginning – from every beginning – I knew she thought I was the one who would understand. That I was the one she'd be able to trust. And all along, deep down, I knew I would never be that brave, or that crazy.
...But I'm getting ahead of myself.