Chapter One: Infatuation
It was the spring of 1975 when I first became infatuated with Lily Evans. Her spiraled red hair was untraceable in the way that she herself was. I could never follow her and most of the time her memory was based purely on essence, on dreams. Her features lay thick in my mind; the pallid skin draped with a thin sheet of freckles, thin torrid legs that were always bare, and her listless eyes illuminated like embers, out of boredom rather than thought.
It came as an unspoken agreement, a pact that we never quite agreed on. She dominated my thoughts with the sound of bells murmuring her name. When she was gone I dreamt of her, when she was present I absorbed her every move, drank in her words like wine. In the mornings when she would stumble into the common room with dark bags hung below her eyelids and baggy clothing radiating her thinness I sat in the puffed leather chair reading the same book day after day, watching her, hoping to catch a glimpse that meant something, that would help me dissolve her mystery.
She did things, all things, in a manner that I couldn't even comprehend. Each movement laced with glamour, dripping with an unseen elegance that I could never trace back to anywhere but the sky. Watching her eat was intoxicating; my thoughts became instantly stagnant. She held the spoon between her thumb and her forefinger and pushed the small bites of food into her mouth, coaxing them inside her. She cut meat ravenously with the knife biting down to the plate with fervor. Everything about her sent me into a trance, left me flailing only in my own imagination--a bottomless trough of days that had never happened and things I never really knew.
My days were commandeered by hallucinations of kissing her, of watching her lift her skirt. My hormones were rampant of images of her. Things that were seemingly not erotic sent me into a tizzy. Lily sitting at her desk, her skirt bunched up, plain view of her thigh. Lily bending forward to grab a book, a quick flash of her pearly bra. Lily flirting with the cooks, her ankles twisted together, her back arched. My unrequited love ached and grew wider as the days past, much like a tumor.
I can remember a day when all of us were sitting in our room. I lay on my unkempt sheets looking up at the ceiling watching the cracks bend into images of lawnmowers and female lips. The room smelled bitterly of pot as clouds of smoke coiled in between our beds. The Beatles oozed from the radio.
All the lonely people, where do they all belong? All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
The sorrow in those words reached me and a hazy vision of Lily toppled my thoughts. It was all so clear now: her blinding woe, her emptiness. All this time she had been calling for me, screaming to be saved from her lackluster life of glamour and charisma. She was miserable and I could save her.
That was how it began: as a quest that sprung from infatuation, as something that quickly deepened into obsession which lead me to a prime fixation on a girl I had never known. My love was bending between orbitals up in space, swirling amongst harmony and God's fingers, untouched by reality. Something as fine and malleable as tears. In my dreams she loved me back and knew the curves of my ankle, knew every molecule of lust dividing my blood and how all of it could belong to her, how most days it already did.
I watched her play in the snow with drops of ice clinging to her hair the way I clung to her, to the Lily that existed purely in my mind's eye. She walked the halls as if they were a runway and I watched her, saw everything she wanted me to, understood how much she needed me and how much, in return, I ached for her. Our relationship, much like my love, was intangible. It was hollow to the naked eye for it was something that existed on a level far deeper than one could see, miles beneath the earth's crust. Our love resided in the world of possibility; a place more pure and more immaculate than fallen angels, more devastating than wishes left unanswered.
So I spent my time trying to find her, to understand the woven tentacles of her womanhood, of her petty existence and the meaning behind those mossy, lethargic eyes that I ingested during class and memorized at night. I grew up behind the screen of my delusion and watched my self wither into a walking, beating, throbbing item for her to grasp, for her to finally see. I let myself be as transparent as water hoping that one day she would seize the opportunity that I had so meticulously crafted for her, that maybe one day far off in the future she would notice me looking and for the first time I would see her look back.
I laughed at jokes that she never spoke and breathed in secrets she wasn't yet aware of. I watched the clothes gripped against her body and swallowed the various lines and circles of her too-much makeup, like a freckled Madame Alexander doll. I raised my voice to answer for her in class and shuddered in ecstasy when we came in contact at all. I watched my windows hum with her presence and heard feminine voices whisper in her lilt, fast-paced and unanalyzed. In the night I kissed pillows pretending to be her and listened to her every word, hoarding information in case one day she left me all alone. I spent hours trying to visualize her laugh or brush my hair so I looked more like the boyfriends she had and discarded. I did countless things all in the hope that she would find me in the way that I had found her, that she would love me wholly and entirely as she did in my thoughts.
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