The Girl

She was 17 when she began disappearing. Every afternoon there was a little less of her, and soon people around her started remarking how pale she'd become. The color washed out; the apple green mingled with the banana ochre and collided with the orange orange as they swirled into nothingness, and crept away, leaving her alone.

No one cared too much about it, though. People don't have time for fruity colors, any more than they have time for looking up at the evening sky, or saying hi to their morning sugar. I wouldn't even say 'now they don't have time', because they've never had it. The time, I mean.

But there was no denying it. She was fading away. Curiously enough, it started with her eyebrows. Don't ask me, I don't know why.

She did regain corporeality at times. Sometimes, when she listened in between the notes of her guitar, or when she sat cross legged in the night, looking out of her rain splattered window, reading her poetry, she could almost feel herself whole. Ephemeral balloons of humid happiness used to call her back, sometimes. Not that she cared too much. She'd come to terms with the graduating greyness. In fact, I think she almost welcomed the slow fade. She'd always been lost within herself; in the hookah puffs of the music and the receding colours of her mind. She used to have the scent of smouldering hashish in her hair, and the tang of soft alcohol in her insouciant eyes.

At the age of 20, three and a half years after It happened, she disappeared completely. Funnily, no one noticed she was going until she was gone. They got over her, eventually. Time and sleep heal, perhaps too much.

Me? I often wonder what colour her eyes were before they finally faded away into patterned emptiness. I used to love them when they were brown. They reminded me of chocolate.