Sketches from memory:

Nicole, sitting on the massive hood of her disease-yellow galleon of a car, staring into the engulfing darkness above the freeway. Conversation of the transience and tragic beauty inherent in all of our brief lives. She wore blue jeans and a yellow sweater, tightly fitting against her Raphaelesque figure. Silence punctuated by the hissing of cars far below on the grey, worn asphalt.

Her warm voice, speaking of the pain of rape, of the lack of understanding, of the shame, of the rage she felt; of the injustices and blindness of those around her.

Her eyes were beautiful in the moonlight.

She and I leaning against a battered and graffiti-caked embankment wall; her voice and mine mists of honesty, revelation, laughter, and pain, weaving in a slow dance with the blue-grey smoke from my constantly replenishing cigarette, its cherry-tip punctuating the darkness.

Her face as we stared at each other, at the vast and incomprehensible heaven...

We spoke as two people who slough off the leaden garments of hidden-ness and isolation, fearing yet craving the nudity of complete openness.

We shared everything and nothing, and found a brief love, there in the night, with our ceiling above the eternities of time and distance, and our vital, beautiful, evanescent honesty tore through the infinities on a jet of fire - never to be regained.

Two weeks later, I left her. She rode a Greyhound into the distance, and into herself.