I told her that I was falling in love with a girl in my dreams. It was the wittiest pickup line I had, and she laughed. Pity, she knew I would take it.

She was nameless. A stretch of nouns and vowels that I can't bring out of me now. 7&1/2 heads tall rough. Slender. Grease on her face. Her cropped hair hung white blond curls on her forehead. She owned eyes that would dance and chill the war in any man. But she chose me.

It was providence I feel that led us together more than necessity

She rode with me down to the beach in a sleek colored car made more of sound and color than lines.

She cracked jokes on Voltaire

Her laugh is maniacal and hypnotizing.

As we reach the beach the waves crash over her laughter.

She spills in and out of the surf and I watch.

I walk along the edge staring out into the bright silver endlessness. Thoughtlessness. Above me the clouds hovered heavy blue and reflection-less against the silver sea. The sun rose higher still above the clouds a white ball that never forgives.

She seemed worried. She looked off into the distance and saw something I could not. I searched even further but as I turned she ran for the car laughing, as she kicked sand in my face. Back in the car, she kissed me, and offered me a cigarette.

I took one.

We rode back to the dorms, over a cooling desert highway with the top down and a dark rocks and cool replacing the most blazing orange in the sky behind us, driving ninety Through the saguaro cacti narrowly escaping their growing shadows, their arms bent and strained for us as we fled into the churning purple wind into the night the giddy children from the silver sea.

Drunk on our laughs and wild imaginations we found ourselves to my bed. I asked her name. She reached for a pen on my desk and wrote near the back of my sketchpad which she placed at the foot of my bed.

'When I'm gone.' was all she whispered.

Her eyes laughed again and she sprang up. I sprang after. Her head peaked around the doorway and I followed. Up the stairs. Up higher and higher until we were naked in the showers. She were unpacking her things.

I watched in wondering which dangerous man, which spider lurked in her future only to capture this thing of beauty, she which made angels stare, which man would clip her wings.

I shudder at the thought.

She again told me in her un-veiled vision that it was time to leave. I yanked on my Tshirt and she was already lacing her boots.

We ran out to the parking lot where the color convertible car wouldn't start, and began to melt into the pavement.

She pulled me by my arm. We dashed in from the night under a square of luminescence left by an empty gas station. There a diesel truck idled and she loved to drive. It started on the third try. No angry trucker came from the rectangle of bright doorway to stop us.

We drift slowly down the road and we talked.

and talked

And talked

and talked

together we solved the worlds problems. we drove up impossible hills tiny cars honking their horns, she just laughing. We drove in circles around blocks sending smoke signals into the ether every time she punched the gas with her steel toe.

And the police were upon us, she only laughed harder and I with her, as they pulled us from the truck.

They hit me, and drown me, and beat me, but I would never relinquish her name. The man in front of me was a tower of black. His sunglasses reflected the worry in my face.

He cracked his knuckles and I heard that laugh. A mixture of his and hers.

She slinked from the shadow like a hungry cat and laughed harder.

She was thrown against the wall, her nose was beaten in, a bat collided with her head. A hand went to her temple and she whispered 'my neck, I think it's breakii-' Her head fell loose like the loop at the end of a pullstring. And I died in my heart.

But her shoulders were taken away along with the broken head, where in place was the head of another girl. wearing a prosthetic to dupe me, the sunglasses underneath the mask probed me, but never would I relinquish her sacred name. Her heavenly name. You must be crazy if you think I'm going to tell you what she wrote in that sketchpad. She doesn't know what a reason she's given me to live.

I'm falling in love with a girl from my dreams.