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She said Go write us a story so I did, sitting down and typing: "she had the kind of deep blue eyes that a man wanders into and gets lost and doesn't care, the kind of blue that compels a man to go to war and kill other men and burn fields and knock down idols and and come back 20 years later after wandering the seas lost amongst monsters and hurricanes only to find those eyes forever closed and buried under six feet of dirt, and he would do it all again, the kind of blue that if they were green they would be the color of jungles set on fire in darkest South America, the kind of blue that if they were brown they'd be the fresh black earth of a man's grave and he happy to embrace the soil forever and ever. Her eyes were the deep blue of standing on top of the tallest building in the city at the wickedest hour of the night, gazing out over the billions and trillions of photons rushing like thoughts from lamppost to headlight to traffic light to marquee, the expectancy and the absolute certain notion that if you just overcome the fear you could step out onto the night sky and fly triumphant over petty men's petty dreams on the floor of the city. But they were also the cold hard blue that makes certain that if you step off the top of the soaring tower you will plummet so fast that your own eyes will bleed the red hot sorrow of never ever knowing just how deep those blue eyes go." I don't know which I loved more: her eyes, or my fascination with her eyes, but as I went back with the dirty gray mouse and corrected typos she yelled are you done yet? So I printed it out, ripped the dry white foolscap from the metal teeth of the printer and handed it to her, watching those eyes dart left and right and her eyelids ride lower and lower as she read. Then she looked gazed glared stared watched saw glanced at me, my oval fat face, and said That's not a story, so I went back, and typed, "We were working in that hot glass box, the four of us, working very hard at not working, with nothing to do but stare out the window at passerby who didn't want tickets to El Mexican Magnifico, nothing to do but wait while the nerdy one with a crush on our boss tried to put together enough words in a meaningful line to entertain us until a fat old grammacita walks up to fork over hard-waited-for social security for another overpriced Marquez Bros. production. That hot glass aquarium, twenty feet by five, wherein we sat and and watched the mindless bug eyed fishes wandering around campus between classes, between palm trees, between brief moments of awareness in a place called San Jose where silicon is cheap and computers make men rich enough to hold Mexican folk singers and grammacitas in disdain. That hot glass aquarium where we sat in puddles of own boredom with nothing to do but listen to the dry clack of the letters turning over on the info-marquee outside and over our heads echoing the fast cackle-tap of the nerdy one trying to impress who he thought was the only human being in the whole wide world. We were the nerd, the boss, the skater, and the art major, four people who's edges when rubbed together created such a cacophony as to drown out the sounds of anything interesting or relevant that might have lurked in one of our individual's presence." The others had passed my first page around, smirking at the boss and rolling their eyes at me as I dutifully printed out this second page and handed it to her, feeling deep deep within my gut a movement of fear when she quickly took it from my hands, because the sacrifice of a millisecond's-extra wait belied that maybe she had been flattered by the first page and anticipated this second and I would have to overcome my every sense of self preservation and act on that anticipation and engage her in the sort of conversation that would lead us to acknowledge one another's presence as we passed in the quad with something more than a glance and a tiny nod, perhaps now a smile and an actual pronunciation of one another's names. "Or maybe even" I wrote further, "a stopping and a standing, a sort of wistful waiting while the air shifted around, moving her hair about her face, the clouds melting to allow the sun to brighten up her eyes, flashing at me, my legs going weak but still strong enough to step forward, hold her in my arms, and eyes wide and staring into one another's we press out lips together and kiss, every corner, every small part of our lips our mouth our tongue our throats our souls negated in this infinite kiss which we know must have begun with the start of the universe, a kiss initiated by the big bang and hot with enough energy to fuel the smooth running of the universe, eternity defined by the power and grace of this our first, our last, or only kiss: religions rise, gods die, and still we hold each other locked together one as only a pair of soft red lips and fire hot blue eyes can be, until at last exhausted by the exchange of souls we let our arms fall and continue on our way, to class, to lunch, back home, whomever we may have been walking with receiving as answer to the question 'who was that' the reply 'someone I work with in the box office,' and a tiny, self-satisfied grin."
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