01.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed. He's small in size but big in heart and he always sleeps on the right side of the bed. He scolds me for being too serious and I scold him for eating his steak too rare.

He's flipping through my fashion magazines with one bare foot propped up on the coffee table. They tell him pointless things that he thinks are very important, like how faded jeans are in and that he's a summer, although he always liked autumn best.

"See?" he said to me last Fall as he pulled off a red oak leaf off a branch. He pulled it harder than he needed to, his smile tinged with a secret bitterness as the entire tree shook with his force. "Things are most beautiful when they are almost gone."

He says the same thing about melting icicles and sparklers and sand castles. And because I love him so, I don't tell him that the reason he's so beautiful is because he's almost gone.


02.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed, and sleeps on a mattress with no bed frame. He lives alone at 17, his house a mess of old pizza boxes and fashion magazines he orders for me. He holds his cigarettes the cool way like in old movies, limply between his index and middle finger to form a peace sign. His fingers scream false hope. I watch him from the kitchen, knowing his bloom is ending although he's still young. His sixteenth birthday and driver's licence mark his midpoint.

I think back to the days when he was young when we'd share Chapman's double-popsicles on the piazza of his duplex. When I was too weak to break them in half so he'd always break them for me, giving me the slightly bigger one. When he was the strongest man in the world and not just a dying breed.

"Do you love her?" I ask with runny-red eyes, turned away so he can't see me. He blows smoke rings absentmindedly.

"Do you love her?" I ask again, more sternly this time. My voice cracks a little. He puts the cigarette and fashion magazine down on the coffee table.

"Yeah," he says hesitantly but surely. "Yeah, I really do."

"You better," I scold. "You know what horrible control you can over a girl's heart."

"Yeah," he repeats. "I know."

I want to say "So do I," but I don't because I wouldn't dare kill off a dying breed.


03.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed, and he's getting married today. She's beautiful, pure, smart, and funny; everything that I can't be. I'm the only one he reads his self-written vows to before the wedding.

I am sitting on the edge of the bed as he reads his pretty words that aren't for me. As he reads, I notice his enlarged Adam's apple and his five-'o-clock shadow and suddenly he looks so grown up to me. I grip the sheets, watching my knuckles turn white. There is a long silence after he finishes until my sob breaks it.

"You promised..." I begin. "You said you'll never grow up."

He smiles like a bee stung him. "I guess I lied."

I know he knows the words I'm about to say and I know he knows that I know so the words slip out easily between my lips.

"You know, I always hoped that... we would get married." I inform. He sighs, letting out a lungful of hot air.

"You know I can't marry imaginary friends." he says decisively yet softly, to make it easier for me. My heart drops. He promised he would never call me that.

"Why can't I be real like you? Like her" I ask icily.

He walks to the window and opens the blinds and closes them, sending a signal to the heavens to swallow him up. There's no answer and he turns back to me.

"I don't know," he says, rubbing his temples. "But sometimes that's all I want." He leans into me to brush away my imaginary tears, but his hands just goes through me and through the empty air.


04.
It's because we're so close that we don't have to speak sometimes. He knows me so well that I don't even have to tell him that I don't like his wife, and I know him so well that he doesn't even have to tell me he's going to die soon.  I don't remember when he figured that out, and I don't remember telling him, so I just sit in my home in his closet playing the stopwatch to his death as he and his wife make carefree love on the bed I used to sleep in.

As I count down the seconds to his demise, he doesn't tell me that every second he's wishing that she was me; the imaginary girl, the perfect girl he created and lived side-by-side for 10 years. He doesn't tell me that he wishes that her body and voice were the body and voice I never got to have. He doesn't tell me that he forces himself to forget me. That no one can be perfect and that he loves his wife, he loves her, but only because she's the closest real person to perfect.

I wish he would tell me; it would make things so much less painful.


05.
He rarely talks to me anymore, the only time he does is when he drinks too much and his wife scolds him for hallucinating. He is starting to drink less and less and I'm happy because alcohol is unhealthy but sad because he's starting to forget me.


06.
He dies when he is 32. His wife is 29. She is still young; young enough to get remarried and that is exactly what she does 2 months after his funeral. I am not like her. I do not forget pain like she does. That is because I am too much like him. He never forgot pain.

This is exactly what I was afraid of. This is exactly what I was afraid of when he grew taller and grew facial hair and broke his voice, while I remained exactly the same since 25 years ago, the little nymphet who longed for the only thing she couldn't have. While he took more and more steps toward his too-early end, I watched helplessly as he drew closer and closer to his death. Once again, I have been left behind. I am alone.

She left his loft ages ago to live at her new boyfriend's house. A big, fancy, stucco-finished mansion which she was so excited to live in that she didn't bother packing. I open the freezer door and I bite back a cry when I see one-half of a Chapman's double-popsicle, waiting to be eaten by someone who will never come back.


07.
One day I will find a new boy. One who is beautiful, pure,

but not dying.