Ella

For twenty years I’ve been looking for someone who actually gets the chaos inside me, someone who can smoke through an entire plantation with me and then get wasted and stupid and reckless, someone who’ll make our first million with me and then just sit back multiplying the money, multiplying the DNA, multiplying the land. Found our own country. Evict Fox from his lake house. Watch the whole thing burn. That’s the fantasy anyway, and in theory it’s flawless, but in practice I haven’t found her yet, not unless you count that slightly off but still delicious cheeseburger, though every so often something happens that hits harder than any drug or chocolate bar could.

I’m betting you’ve felt it too. You’re walking down the street, at a party, standing in a museum, just moving through the world with your head empty, and then she passes. The sun is practically exploding with light. Birds are screaming at each other. The air smells like some illegal mixture of sunflower fields and spearmint, and her face, her hair, her entire being just barely grazes your life for one second. It doesn’t matter if you’re brave enough to follow her like an idiot or too chickenshit to move—she’s already gone, vanished back into nowhere, and you’re still here on your predetermined wrong dirty path when you should’ve been saved.

That’s what happened with Ella. I saw her on a modeling site, lost my mind completely in that instant, and I would’ve dragged her to an altar full of Klingons without knowing a single true thing about her. Her age? No clue. What she does? Haven’t got an idea. Where she’s from? Maybe New Zealand. But it doesn’t actually matter anymore. Because Ella is really just every girl who’s ever flickered through my field of vision, who never had any idea I was watching, and who left nothing behind except this small enormous feeling of freedom and immortality and some parallel universe where we’re already together.