Status: hai guise. NO THIS STORY IS NOT OVER. life has been a ***ing party lately and i just haven't had time to write. i'm trying, though; i promise. :)

Willie

until it falls all around like a cold steady rain;

Two weeks after I met Willie, she came to a show we were playing at the Larimer Lounge and she didn't even ask for a free ticket like other girls always do. "I think you're worth ten bucks," she'd said with her hand on my knee while I counted the freckles across her cheeks. There were only twenty or thirty people there but when I saw her at the front of the crowd--Miller High Life, cherry lips, doe eyes--I could've sworn we were playing Madison Square Garden, but at the same time I could've sworn no one was there but her.

I didn't forget the lyrics that time.

After the show I told her she could come over if she wanted so she didn't have to take the bus home alone at night in the cold. Usually I called shotgun but that time I sat in the back of Noah's Civic, and while Noah and David yelled over each other and over the music, she and I sat in silence and she had her hand on my thigh and sometimes she'd look over and smile at me for no reason.

That night we sat on the back porch until four in the morning despite the cold, getting progressively drunker as we shared a bottle of amaretto. Sometimes David or Noah would come outside and yell at us to quit being such loners and and we would just laugh.

She told me she moved out of her mother's house in Albuquerque when she was seventeen and since then she hadn't stayed in the same city or kept the same job for longer than six months. When I asked her why, she was quiet for a long time, then she exhaled deep and I could see her breath in the air and she said, "Sometimes I just feel like I'm looking for something that isn't there." And then she laughed and it sounded like a pin drop in the stark quiet.

I asked her how long she thinks she'll stay in Denver. She smiled at her lap then grabbed my hand and looked right at me and said, "Long enough."

We slept in my bed fully clothed but without shoes and she let me put my arm around her waist. She was so warm and smelled like spring and I swore I'd never been alive until that moment.

The next morning when I woke up she was gone. Right away I missed her more than I think I’d ever missed anyone.