She was a passionate person. Sometimes he thought that was the understatement of the year, but he had never quite been able to find a word more to his liking. She was maybe the most passionate person he had ever known, certainly the most opinionated, and by far the most striking. It had been sometime in between eight and three that he fell in love with her; the lazy morning smile he received each morning when his eyelids threatened to close from exhaustion, and her voice muttered opinions and crass remarks at others in the classroom to keep him awake, and then a period later when he watched her disappear to a back practice room with her blonde haired female conspirator for anything but guitar practice.

Yes, he would admit that he had fallen in love with her slowly, although it was her passion and daring that beat him to the initial realization. It was the first time they had ever laid on his bed, and she was wrapped up in the comforter, her hazy green eyes blinking up at him. Those eyes. He loved her eyes and the depth within them; her whole soul seemed to stare back at him unblinkingly. She was a words person, and he was not so much, and he couldn’t help but smile as even she stumbled quietly, hesitantly, one hand resting around his neck, the other toying with the material of his tee.

She was in that instant the most beautiful creature he had ever laid eyes on, and for all his nervousness, and all his confusion, he knew that whatever this ‘love’ was, it certainly applied to her.

“I do love you.”

He did. He loved her ever-changing hair colour (brown, then purple, then red, then brown again), and her spunk, and her simple but passionate love of writing. She was never more content seeming than in his arms, or with her head bent low over a scrap of paper with a pencil in hand. Her taste of music was sometimes questionable, but he loved her voice singing quietly beside him in the car on long drives down to feed the ducks, or walk Whyte Ave. Her innocence was loveable; she was not a child with adult responsibilities, but neither an adult with childish sensibilities.

Often he found himself watching her with amazement, for she never failed to prove to him just how unique she was. He was ‘too restrained, too solid, too focused on whether ‘x’ equalled ‘y’ all the time’, which drove her up the wall constantly. They were so opposite, yet something was always right because she was the ‘y’ to his ‘x’ and he was the period to complete her sentence. That was just how they seemed to work, and he loved her for it.

Out loud, he always complained about her inability to walk a straight line without getting hurt, but somewhere deep inside he knew that he would rather no one else take care of her. She was a walking catastrophe [you would never have known she was a gymnast for seven years], and he could not even begin to count the number of times he had accompanied her to the emergency room. He, the first time he brought her home to ‘meet his parents’, had to convince his mother that yes she was quite capable of making it down the basement steps on her own, without assistance, because it was certainly not the first time she had been on crutches. He had endured teasing and ribbing from his friends for carrying her purse that one time, and trying her sneakers but he would be damned if she came to anyone else over him for comfort. If she needed her shoes tied because her arm was in a cast, so be it. If she needed him to carry her purse because she couldn’t balance it on her crutches, he would willingly lend an arm. If she needed someone to hold her hair back while she puked from too much to drink, well then, he was the man for the job. And he really wouldn’t have it any other way.

For as much as he looked after her, she really did do an exceptional job of looking after him. Her organization and effectiveness blew him away sometimes; how just one person could have such a foolproof plan of attack was beyond him. She was a neat freak, and while at first it had irked him a little bit, it came to be that nothing in the world put him in a more content mood than watching her from the doorway of his room while she refolded and neatly put away clean tee shirts he had thrown into a pile. She wasn’t domestic (her cooking ability ranged from eggs to French toast to Kraft dinner), but he was always well aware of the feeling in the bottom of his stomach when she mothered him or mentioned the future, or in general looked at him; the slowly growing idea that the future without her in it wasn’t the future at all. She understood him in a way that sometimes was frightening; his moods, his habits, and his thoughts on occasion seemed to be perfectly visible to her just from a slight sideways glace.

She was his best friend and his lover, not just his girlfriend, and he couldn’t help but feel all the more of a man for it. His future was all in her emerald eyes; big dreams and all that she had, and he believed too because there was something intoxicating about the idea of adventures in foreign countries and of an apartment painted in green and dishes that would never match.

It was a future that got him through the days when she was stubborn and he wasn’t compromising, and both of them wondered if it was worth it.

It always was when it came to her, and he believed it always would be.

Until the day it wasn’t.