Watching

(Not much to say about this one. Some of you may have seen this already, as it's an older piece, but it hasn't made it onto CI yet. Some of the word repetition I don't like, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I don't know how I feel about the main character - sympathetically lonely or terrifyingly narcissistic?) 

Everyone around her started turning on their heaters, but she kept wearing her t-shirts, letting the air bite fresh and sharp all down her arms, the crisp cool swishing between the fabric and her warm skin. She felt most alive this way; exposed, chilled. It intensified the experience of existence, a little tug at the peaceful border between her and the air she moved in. She felt it in her movements, a smooth turn opening a door, a quick hand brushing her hair back. It amped up her beautiful moments – the times she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror under perfect light, her gaze just so – found herself a goddess. The moments she wished someone was following her with a camera or a lustful gaze. Wasted, unseen moments of beauty and grace. 

Sometimes, between the moments, when other people caught her looking her worst, human, she wanted to shout and tell everyone that they just missed the moment; that what they had seen wasn’t really her. She knew they would love her, want her, need her, if only they saw those moments. She wished she had a photo album of those moments recorded. Here’s me stepping out of the shower, here’s my reflection in a bus window, here’s me closing my closet door. She would flip the pages and they would see her, intimately, in her perfection, and they would know her and love her and give her what she deserved, for all those moments. The cold jolted those moments, imbued them with a rapid and anxious power, like caffeine. She was a heroine, a goddess of beauty and of war. She was what every man saw in his magazines and wanted. 

In the cold she could feel those moments inside her – her skin was alive, reminding her. Sometimes in the summer it fell asleep under the warm air and she forgot her moments, forgot her value. But the cold kept the sense alert. She never lost a moment in the cold. So while everyone else stayed wrapped in their air and their skin that slept and grew too lazy to find their moments, she lived among hers. Winter brought a deep longing, then, as she ached for an audience. Every kiss of the cold air brushed her with a realization of her perfection but left behind the frustration of loneliness, like the smell of a lover on the bedsheets. 

He would be so lucky, she knew. One day she would turn around after folding a shirt or taking a drink to see him standing there. I saw that, he would say. I watch your fingers when you turn on a light. I see how your hair glows when headlights go by. I’ve seen your ankle sliding gently into those brown shoes. I hear your voice when it hits that note in your favorite song. He would reach out and hold her waist and she would stand in his arms, admired, worshipped, a museum Venus. His eyes like mirrors, she would stare through them back at herself in his gaze. Watch me, she’d whisper, and he would.