Cherry
Blossom Girl
She never showed hesitation even when she mispronounced words most everyone knew how to say properly, she never backed down, she never let it bother her. She never showed hesitation even when she would see someone interesting to talk to at a party and begin to make her way over to greet them only to find an ex-boyfriend speaking with them. Her voice would never falter. Her eyes would never slide over to the ex-lover briefly to see what he thought of her appearance. Her fingers never tightened around her champagne glass and the smile that graced her lips never fell, not for a second.
She resided in a two room flat above a repair shoppe that showcased a multitude of handsome clocks of all fashions in the two picture windows in the front. A small window that was always kept ajar opened up onto a balcony that looked down over the street below and she was often found leaning over the wrought iron banister with a cracked teacup in one hand and a well-worn paperback novel in the other. I never did understand why she went out on that small balcony, it hardly fit her but every morning she squeezed through the window to lean against the railing and sip her tea and read the novels she had long ago memorised.
She wore her long blonde hair loose and she never got it cut. She never much cared for her personal appearance or anyone's appearance but if she had I really don't believe she would've done anything with her hair even then because it looked marvellous whipping about in the wind in the morning as she sipped her tea and read. The only time she ever put her hair up though was when she bathed in the old-fashioned bathtub that was set next to her bed in a part of her flat that she had separated from her living area with privacy screens. Whenever she lit her candles, which was every couple of hours or so, and she was behind those screens I could see every move she made but I never let her know. She was so graceful as a silhouette, as graceful as ever.
She kept her flat dark always for she didn't like electricity all that much and was more partial to her vanilla scented candles anyway. I would sit awkwardly on her creamy white divan and watch her move around in the near-darkness, rearranging the candles for some reason. I never asked why she did things because it would have taken away from who she was and why I loved her so much. I would watch her glance around the room with her pale blue eyes, which were only truly visible when the sunlight was shining on them, and shake her head before making her way over to a stack of books she had near the windows. She moved everything constantly but she never changed. Whenever I would visit her flat I never knew what to expect the furniture to look like or where the divan would be but I always knew she would be dressed in a sheer, low cut, long-sleeved light blue top and a skirt of matching material that trailed along after her in her wake.
She wasn't predictable although I always knew what she was doing at any given time of the day. At five in the morning she would wake up and fill a teacup with water, which she would hold in one hand and heat with her wand. Then she would sip her tea and read a novel, which she knew the story of well and was comfortable with, until ten. As I went about my day I would find myself glancing at the clock and at five in the afternoon I would imagine myself slipping into the breathtakingly hot bathwater as I knew she was doing at that precise moment in time. I would close my eyes and imagine the scent of vanilla intoxicating me as it intoxicated her. Vanilla was her version of oxygen and to feel like I was near her I would buy slabs of it from sweets shops and eat them throughout the day.
She never wore shoes or socks even when she left her flat, which was a rare occasion indeed. Even when she went shopping she never wore shoes but no one ever noticed because her skirts were so long and even if they had I doubt they would've cared because she was so wonderful that a simple smile would make you forget entirely about silly rules and regulations. The floor of her flat was always sparsely covered with towering stacks of books, novels, tomes, and papers and rumpled articles of clothing she had stepped out of. On more than one occasion whilst visiting her I had to resist stealing one of her lilac-coloured negligees. Of course now I wish I hadn't been so foolish. I knew she had to see me watching her, studying her, breathing her, almost but not quite tasting her but she never saw how I closed my eyes and imagined I was her, with her, nearer to her, needing to be inside her.
She never showed hesitation... not even when she was in the bath, steam rising up all around her, breathing in the vanilla and heat. She never showed a second's hesitation when the wind picked up out on the balcony, travelled through her candlelit flat, and caught a single flickering flame. She never showed hesitation even when that flame ignited a stack of papers she had placed next to the candle during one of her many redecorations of her flat. She never showed hesitation even as the heat became too much to bear. She never showed hesitation even when her vanilla scent was lost to the scent of burning wood. She accepted it as it was and didn't try to change it. She never showed hesitation when she could've, should've escaped. She never showed hesitation as she closed her eyes, took one last deep breath, and slipped into the overwhelming heat of her bathwater, never to resurface again.
Au Revoir