There was one night that me and Dess were lying outside. It was evening, during autumn. There was this little breeze that brushed itself against our arms and legs, and dragonflies hovering over the thicket. They would pause for a moment, then flutter over and away from our lazy bodies.
I looked up at the fleecy clouds, stirring and illuminated orange in the sky. “Dess.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the purpose of all of this?”
She thought for a minute, carding her hand through the air as if it were made of jelly. “I don’t know. I think it’s to find beauty in things. Like, you. There’s…this…infinite beauty within you. There is in everyone.”
I smirked and pinched her arm a bit. “So what you’re saying is that you don’t think I’m all that special?”
“I guess you could say that, but in a different way, I think I’m saying that there’s not a single person on this Earth who's remotely like you. If you hold infinite beauty, that means an infinite number of beautiful, purely unique qualities right?”
“Yeah, I’m just teasing you.”
shook her head. “Yeah, I know.”
And then we walked back home on this dirt and stone path that snaked through the woods. It made me feel small, I remember, to be walking on such a thin little tether through something so expansive. The trees around us were pines, a hundred feet tall. Fixtures that had watched the land before our ancestors had even touched it, and would continue to do so when our bodies sank into their soil.
We were so small, in that moment, that I was sure that we could have been gods.
When we got back, we washed up in the sink and then spent the night in my room, which I guess was our safe haven. I felt that I was myself, truly, and I believe she felt similarly to herself. We'd feel each other, too, but more like a comma than a period. It wasn't a full-stop thing, like my own mind in her presence. It was just one moment in a constant river, a singular snapshot of a flow that never stops.
It was beautiful, fragile and momentary, but beautiful nonetheless, like the spring blossoms that grow on my bedroom window.