Yuppa

 

As I watched her slender forefinger skate against the cold, yet securing glass, I felt myself becoming locked into a trance in which I wanted no escape from. As she finished etching the most graceful looking “f” I had ever witnessed into the fog of our car window. Somehow, she had managed to contain her boundless serenity and unwavering beauty inside the confines of a simple letter. The rugged looking “l” I had sloppily marked into the car window simply paled in comparison to her “f”. I found myself mentally smirking, considering our two letters to be a perfect representation of us.

 

While the world outside of the car was enduring a biblical bombardment of forever rolling sheets of rain, our little world inside smelled of pine trees and warm car seats. Scents that were positively avalanched by the captivating smell of her vanilla perfume. I cursed this misty-mooned night as I struggled to see more than her silhouetted self. She was invisible to me. Except for when the windshield wipers moved out of the way just enough to allow the backlight of the car ahead to bathe us in a sea of fiery red.

 

Her hair was oblivion. A black ocean, in which all hope of returning home is lost. I found it damn near impossible to see her eyes, but I didn’t need to. They were burned into the woodworks of my mind. Her bewitchingly brown eyes are the kind that would enthrall even the strongest heroes of myth and legend; Hercules, Perseus, Marty Mcfly. They would all fall under her subtle spell. Perfection was a gross understatement, but unfortunately the word which encapsulated her has not become available to us just yet. So, until such a word graces our vocabulary, she was perfect. And before my lips could recapture the words escaping from my mouth, I was telling her so.

 

“You’re perfect.” I blurted out.

 

“Am I now?” she questioned, not once taking her eye off of the road ahead of her, despite the fact that we were caught in a traffic jam, and had not moved a single inch for the past eleven minutes.Internally, I was lecturing myself about saying dumb shit to ridiculously incredible girls. Externally I explained, “Sorry that was kind of out of the blue”. 

 

“Does that mean you didn’t mean it” she asked, almost quizzically.

 

I stumbled on my words, “well um yeah, I do.”

 

“Well I am afraid I must respectfully disagree with you there” she said, crossing her legs up onto her seat, seemingly coming to terms with our temporary lack of mobility.

 

I glanced at the three pairs of fluffy purple socks she was wearing; the glow in the dark butterfly socks were on the outside, she loved butterflies and hated wearing shoes while driving, hence the absurd amount of socks.

 

“Well I believe you are” I said, reinforcing a point I never intended to make to begin with.

 

She didn’t give me what could be described as an articulate response. Instead, she called upon the great wins and the mighty seas and released a hundred battering hurricanes, a thousand storms and a million floods, all disguised as a single sigh.

 

I sat in an awkward silence, as she sat with her back to the rain-soaked window. She was picking at her nonexistent fingernails, as if she hadn't chewed them into nothingness every day of her life. My focus shifted from listening to the droning rhythm of the windshield wipers to the rain drops dashing down the window beside me. I followed a significantly insignificant drop from the top of the glass; as it slowly scraped down to join the small pool of rainwater in the rubber line that divides the window and the door. So simple, yet that has always managed to hold my intrigue, even as a child, just like when I used to imagine a shapeless creature running alongside the winding view of fences and telephone wires we drove past when I was younger.

 

I was observing an epic race between two brand new rain drops when she took a sledgehammer and shattered the silence between us.

 

“It’s just; I’m not perfect, okay?” she stated. Although I felt her okay did not quite demand an answer.

 

“Why would you think that?” I asked, perplexed that a creature of such beauty could believe such a thing.

 

“I’m not the person you see me as” she said, without removing her eyes from the number 2 button on the car radio. “I’m loud, I’m obnoxious, and I cry a lot, I complain all the time.”

 

I didn’t know what to say back.

 

“Honestly, I am a big mess, and I pretend to have everything together, but there’s always a seam, or a crack that I’m struggling to keep covered, and one day I’m going to burst….”

 

“Zack, the last thing I want is for you to be a part of the fallout when that happens…”

 

The sound of each raindrop torpedoing the puddles outside was becoming more prominent as I sat there, mouth closed shut, at least until I knew what to say.

 

“I’m a mess, and you should know that before we go with whatever this is” she said.

 

She let out another sigh, this time disguising gale force winds. She leaned forward, and added the letters “m” and “l” beside the “f” on the front window: FML.

 

I was scraping the recesses of my mind, to find the words suitable enough to string a sentence in response to that. Suddenly, the car ahead of us slowly inched forward, forging a mighty lake of rainwater between us. It wasn’t until after the car behind us had honked its horn a second time that she managed to uncross her legs and follow suit of the car in front.

 

As the wheels of this mediocre car that,she had bought when she was 18 rolled toward our destination, and the air was filled with awkward silence and heavy hitting warmth from the car’s heater, I realized something.

 

“Perfection isn’t perfect.” I said.

She glanced toward me for a second of eternity, her brown eyes inviting me to continue.

 

“You say you’re loud and obnoxious and you complain all the time.”

She gave a miniscule agreeing nod.

 

“You have to realize, they make you perfect just as much as any other part of you.” I told her. “You could have a thousand and one flaws, but they’ll always add up to you. You are perfection, and perfection is messy.”

 

Her beautiful lips formed a slight smile that sent once dormant butterflies fluttering throughout the reaches of my stomach.

 

“You have a thing with words Zackary Mullen, you know that?” she smirked, gripping the steering wheel with her beautifully soft hands.

 

I couldn’t help but smile like an idiot. Even though I knew that what I had said wouldn’t magically make her accept herself, it was a start.  As I said, she had a hundred hurricanes, a thousand storms and a million floods all disguised as a single sigh. So I'll just desperately try to disguise a few clumsy words as the sun in the sky.