She's like chartreuse molasses, or something else similarly vibrant and spaced out; maybe she's a neon flower through the haze in an opium den.
She came to the door in black clothes and a beige beret and stayed for an hour. I know about her previous relationship in Georgia; her injuries as a dancer and photographer in New York City; her need to repaint her bedroom turquoise because the sage color is too deadening. Her love of curtains, and how she doesn't really drink much, but a beer on a hot day in the backyard is really nice. And she'll be drying her unmentionables on a laundry line out back.
I was in the middle of playing hooky to grade papers all day when she rang the bell, and the whole time she stood here, petting the cat, drawling sweetly about this and that, I couldn't decide if I'd met my new best friend or someone I will spend the next several months studiously avoiding by allowing the dinosaur ferns out front to finally obscure the front door.
I'm charmed by her friendliness and her weirdness (she kept referring with nostalgia to her "old neighborhood," which it turns out is a few blocks north of here, about five minutes away), but a little worried that the (miniscule) backyard is about to be invaded by 8,000 carefree artist types plunking away on guitars to all hours, amid the fuschia underpants swinging drowsily from the clothes line.
And then, what's so terrible about that? I'm always bemoaning the lack of community in our short row of apartments, and a super friendly neighbor who loves our cats and vintage furniture and fabrics and, okay, adds a little quirk to our backyard sounds fun. I think I've become so used to people being inaccessible--maybe to being a little bit that way myself--that someone so un-anxiously outgoing is a bit of a shock.
It's almost like Pippi Longstocking went to Sarah Lawrence, mated with Phoebe from Friends, and then the issue of that union moved in next door.
Readers, I sense a story.
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