December 3rd, 1993

She could see daydreams brewing in his eyes, sleepy sapphire stars rimmed with ruby. In another era, he'd have been James Dean or Steve McQueen. In this one, he was just Desmond Dovist. There was even something sorta dreamy about the somnambulic way he walked when he couldn't feel his feet on the ground. When he brushed past her, his china-white skin felt cold to the touch. A chill ran up her scoliotic spine.

Everything he did, he did with a sarcastic self-awareness she couldn't help but observe. "If I could make this world... as pure and strange as what I see... I'd put you in the mirror... I put in front of me." This time, it was his turn to stare. Not with longing so much as amusement, though. She thought she'd just thought those words, but maybe he'd read her mind. She wouldn't be surprised. He was Desmond Dovist.

He turned and talked to her about the strangest things. He said he envied the blind, because they get to see exactly what they see in the world. He said that his curse was his acute sense of what is. He said he was going to pay to be blinded some day in a sort of reverse Lasik procedure. He made a lot of plans for "some day" she figured. Some day when he was rich and famous. "And when I'm your trophy wife," she added and he agreed

April 5th, 1994

Through narrowed azure eyes, she stared at him across the playground. Desmond Dovist. He sat in a cloud of smoke with three others. The police wouldn't hassle them today, and they knew it. He gingerly rose to his feet. He spoke quietly, but she could read his cracked lips. "I'm getting too f***ing old for this s***." It was warm for April, so he rolled up the sleeves of his black Sonic Youth shirt. A black studded belt held up his damaged dirty green jeans. It was his third day wearing them. What a fashion statement. She rolled her blue eyes.

He looked her way. Lifted up his James Dean Wayfarer sunglasses. His eyes were pale blue too. "Sometimes I feel so happy... sometimes I feel so sad... sometimes I feel so happy... but mostly you just make me mad." He grinned a little, baring straight but yellowed teeth. Apparently he could read her lips, too. Ava Adore was her name.

Some day, she'd move to Paris and work at Shakespeare and Co. Or Seattle where she could cover the grunge scene for Pitchfork. Maybe even the city of angels. For now, she was stuck in suburbia with an insufferable boy, a head full of daydreams, and seventy-five cents in her pocket. She walked to the fountain and made three wishes.

September 13th, 1996

She lay beside him in the green grass that stood so stark against the blue sky. He'd made blue her favorite color. Like the song. Like his jeans. Like his eyes. Like the sky. They often liked to look up at the sky and find action in the clouds, but today offered no such ethereal vaporplayers. "Desmond?"

"Yes Angel?" He called her Angel because she was the heavenly muse to the crazy dumbsaint of his mind and they both knew it now. Angelic adorable Ava Adore. In you, I taste God. She didn't finish the thought in word but he got the gist. They were kindred seraphic souls united in their common vision of an Eden on the run. They were fallen angels guilty of the original sin of wanting to know, know everything, know each other everyway.

He felt her words echoing in his porcelain head. "You're a genius all the time." She made him believe in the holy contour of life, so far transcendent of anything his vagrant's brain or artist's heart could ever imagine. He stared up at the sky looking glass clear and glass fragile and imagined it shattering and raining down on them like iridescent fireworks in the daytime.

November 3rd, 1996

As he studied his past in Polaroid, Desmond Dovist hoped never to live long enough to see this life he loved with such an all-imbibing energy fade to sepia snapshots, Kodak moment memory. He wanted to live forever in technicolor.

Her touch on his skin robbed all his muscles of their tension. She broke her own spoken rule of talking about the future and asked, "Where are we gonna be in a hundred million years?"

"You're gonna be a flower."

"And you?"

"I'll be a bee."

The future felt like fiction. He hoped he could write it right. So strong was his devotion to living life straight out of a Bob Dylan song or the Duluoz Legend that no other could ever stand him. He and her were so blessed to be die-cast from the same heavenly mould. Never could he break her Kevlar heart, so like a post-modern Bonnie and Clyde, they'd go side by side hand in hand and find out if they were bulletproof.