Blue-Eyed GIrl

I stood in the book store, paralyzed, with Marquez in one hand and Borges in the other, trying to remember what life was like before she walked through the door. Dark skin, long dark hair, a white chemise and eyes that were the palest blue things this side of the Caribbean. She looked right past me and I ceased to exist.
Did she really not even notice me?
The clerk slid my change across the counter and turned to help her. I fumbled it into my pocket, suddenly idiotically clumsy, then drifted away, wraithlike to inspect the rest of the bookstore. Of, course, I had already inspected the bookstore, but I had no choice, I was trapped in her orbit. Philosophy – Kant, Heigle, Marx, -- I tried to look interested but couldn’t concentrate on anything. I had to say something, get her attention, impress her, enthral her, invite her to dinner, then drinks, a walk on la Rambla, Sunday morning breakfast in bed…but I was mute and invisible.
The clerk shifted positions and obstructed my view so I floated over to the Art section, grasping for something to anchor me, gasping for life, feeling weightless but trapped. She examined two different copies of the same book, carelessly brushed an errant lock of coffee coloured hair off her face. Here eyes flickered up for just a second, then back down passing right over me without the slightest hint of recognition.
I couldn’t escape a sense of panic coupled with despair. I wafted over to the counter, unwilling or unable to leave her presence for some mysterious, perverse, and altogether masochistic reason. She took a sheet of paper from her purse, a reading list and compared the titles on it to the books in front of her with a frown. I leaned over the counter, close enough to smell her light perfume and whisper in her ear. Instead, I read the books on the list. They all had to do with law. She looked up, as if remembering something or sensing my presence, but of course she did not see me, her very own ghost.
A draft whispered through the shop disturbing papers and fluttering through stacks of tomes. It blew me right out into the street where I snagged a table of books laid out for display. Science fiction and thrillers. I stared at her through my own reflection in the window. I needed time, I thought. Time to get to know her, find out what she liked and disliked, time to languish in the pools of her pale blue gaze.
She closed the books she was looking at, handed them to the clerk and walked out, never once turning my way. I debated whether to follow, to prolong the pain of her presence, or accept the pain of her departure. I decided to follow, but too late. She was too far ahead in the crowd. I flitted down the narrow sidewalk packed with shoppers, and antique vendors and fruit sellers and old men selling pots and pans and parrots and mayonnaise, ever one step to slow. Up ahead, her coffee coloured hair came into view for fleeting moments through the crowd, then disappeared again beneath the waves, every time disappearing for longer periods until finally vanishing forever into the sea of people.
I recovered myself then. It felt like waking up after a fever has broken. I was me again, whole, strong, confident. Still, there are some dreams one never forgets, and some illnesses which leave us just a little less than what we were. I have already begun to forget her face, or the exact colour of her skin, or the way her hair fell over her shoulders, but I will not forget those eyes, even though I would very much like to.