I remember first making eye contact with your vacant stare and letting my eyes linger on you because I was sure that you weren’t looking back.  And I remember getting a little too close, so that I caught your scent.  Shower fresh with a touch of something like sour candy.  And I remember getting a little too close for a second time, a second shameless sniff.  I guessed then about your fragility, not so hidden but easily overlooked because of your exacting stature, the precisely hung geometry of your frame.

 

I still can feel the soft terrycloth of the towel that clung to your slender body that afternoon.  The one where we were painting the tree house you built for your nephew, and it got so hot that we took off our clothes and ran into the lake.  I remember watching you run and admiring the matte surface of your skin.  How it never sweated, never reflected.  You told me that we are all mostly transparent and you laughed at me when I said you might be an exception to the rule.  But it’s true, your skin, even now, maintains the most opaque shade of pale pink.

 

There is something else that always got to me.  Every object that you owned was simple beyond measure.  It was as if you purposefully acquired the most average, utilitarian objects in existence and then washed them clean of any traces of distinction.  But somehow neither your appearance nor person was made dull by it.  This poise, as I have come to call it, made your influence ubiquitous not only to the ones around you but the natural environment that proudly accommodated you.  I remember how the grass around your feet or the mountains over your shoulder became mundane in that way that a million beautiful landscape postcards become mundane.

 

And I know what everyone’s been saying, but I don’t care if you don’t provide any support you pretty pink mink.  I want to feel the space between your rungs and run my fingers along the seams of your terrycloth stitches.  Come down from that wall.