What if I told you
she came to me in a dream?

Pixie eyes, pirate smile,
drifting stride, quantum touch,
dream fingers, sorrowed lips
with the weight of things she only halfway knew.

She had emerald eyes.

She was not a showstopper,
she was a dragonfly’s thud
upon the soft-soiled ground.
Blink and you might miss it.

I didn’t miss it.

She gave me one of her wings
because she could still float with half of what she had,
she glowed like my flickering torch was about to go out.

She gave me one of her laughs
because she knew I needed it more than the price I could have given,
more than the precious second it took her to compress a puff of breath in a melody like a sweet spring gust out of her chest.
I took it and bottled it up and hoped that bottle would find me someday, no matter how far from home I am.

She gave me one of her hearts
because she loved like double,
she loved like a broken mirror that clones its reflection,
she loved like she was everyone in the world all at once
or maybe just everyone in that room.

And you should have seen her sing.

She had emerald eyes.

And even though her words to me were smoke that night
like a dream bouncing off the prow of that ship
she still held them like a blink of laughter,
like they would slip away at the slightest earthquake
or the slightest tremble in her lungs
or the slightest shake in her steady voice.

She still gifted those words to me in silver wrapping,
but she didn’t have to spend time wrapping because
the silver glided like a misty curtain over them in the twilight.
She didn’t need to put any weight on those words
for them to strike me, a catapult I wasn’t expecting
and through all this
she kept a steady beat
tapping her hands on the ground
on the sky
on the windstorm brushfire brewing billowing steam beneath us reaching to the center of the earth
Through all this
she kept a steady beat
twisting her hands in mine.

And when my vision was tunneling, cloudy,
gone completely,
that was when she saw the clearest.

She had emerald eyes.