Blooming Hydrangeas

"Tell me," she asked one warm night by the fire, "how do you humans express this 'love?'"

Nearly asleep, the quirks in her speech pattern brought me to life, and I looked over at her with a resound curiosity.

"What makes you so curious?" I replied back. The unfamiliar topic of human emotion never interested her before, perhaps because the thought of something she couldn't understand intimidated her.

The blanket draped over her shoulders was beginning to fall loose around the corners. Instinctively, I leaned over and wrapped it tighter around her body, hoping to block out the winter chills that somehow slipped in among the fire's heat.

She regarded me with a look of confusion at the contact.

"Sorry," I remembered, looking into the whirlpool of colors that swirled in her eyes. "I forgot that you don't need this." I reached out to take the blanket from her shoulders, but she placed her hand, unnaturally warm for January, upon my wrist lightly. I stopped, entranced by her eyes.

"Don't," she said gently, shaking her head. "I want to feel like you do. I want to experience winter with you, whatever that might look like."

As my response lagged a few seconds, I was overcome with the feeling I always get when I gaze into those eyes, which blazed with colors you couldn't find on earth: the feeling that her form was flickering, a candle whose flame the wind disturbed. She seemed almost transparent to me, that if I touched her warm skin, my hand would pass through in a cloud of fog and mist that smelled of strawberries and sweet, sweet laughter.

The feeling was gone as soon as it came, as soon as she flicked her eyes away from mine and broke the gaze that seemed to connect us in ways that were not of the human nature.

I leaned away from her, feeling nearly several degrees colder away from her skin. "Okay," I agreed with her, wondering what had made her change her mind.

I knew that the adjustment to earthen customs was quite difficult at first, what with understanding social cues and performing correct body language and forming the words of our race with her inexperienced tongue. I understood that it wasn't going to be easy for her to reside here with me, away from the comfort of familiarity, but she had insisted otherwise. She had insisted that I was her Muse. That I was the reason she had come here in the first place. Even after her progressively exasperated explanations about the doctrine of Muses, I was only able to comprehend it in the earthen belief of soulmates, a word of which she was unfamiliar.

"So tell me," she pressed again, bringing my attention back to her face. "Tell me about how humans express love."

Gingerly I set my lukewarm cup of tea on the wooden floor in preparation to answer her question.

"Sure," I agreed, wrapping a second blanket around myself to preserve warmth. "But don't fall asleep."

She chuckled politely at the joke, both of us knowing that the concept of sleep was something so unbelievably foreign to her that she could only associate it with the concept of death, one of which she did understand, but which was so complex in nature that I gave up trying to learn it.

"In our lifetimes," I began, "we experience and express love so often that it becomes sort of a second nature to us. But you have to understand that love comes in so many different forms, each unique to every person."

"Like Muses," she cut in.

I nodded. "But the funny thing about love is that you don't really notice it at first. People sometimes think that when you love someone, it shows itself in some sort of grand, conspicuous gesture. But it doesn't."

T cocked her head to the side like a dog, forcibly trying to understand my words. Something like a fire ignited inside my chest and suddenly made me feel warm. I removed a blanket and continued.

"Love happens gradually, in the form of small and seemingly meaningless gestures. Like how a snowball rolls downhill, collecting tiny bits of snow along the way, but they all eventually come together to make a really big snowball. Like that, only less cold."

"Less cold?" she inquired.

"Well, not actually cold." I thought for a moment. "It's just this feeling you get in your chest, and it seems to strike a sweet sort of warmth inside your body and when you feel it, you suddenly can't get enough. You can't live without it."

She seemed puzzled at this, but it was cute. Her eyebrows, bold against the light cocoa of her skin, came together so that little creases formed on her forehead, and I had the impeccable desire to touch my fingers to them and feel the heated skin beneath my own and to trace the ridges of age and history embedded into those wrinkles.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked at once, her voice tinged with only a small amount of distaste. After a while on earth, she began to grow more accustomed with being looked at, which I expect I should take the blame for. She's so ethereal, sitting here on my sunken couch in this shivering cabin in the woods, I wondered how it was possible that she could have picked me as her Muse.

She didn't pick you, I remembered, drifting back to that day in the garden as she told me about the theory of Muses while planting rows of hydrangeas. She said it was something like destiny.

That realization sent a pleasant sort of chill up my arms. At once, T touched them, dragging her fiery fingers across the raised bumps on my skin, and when she looked at me I thought that maybe it wasn't such a coincidence that she had asked me about love.

"I want to hear more," she pleaded quietly. "Please, tell me more."

Unwillingly trapped in her gaze again, I told her this:

"There used to be a wild dog that lived in my neighborhood, and as a child, I was always afraid of it, but more importantly, its power. I knew it could bite, and bark, and use its claws to tear layers of my skin clean off. He liked to live in the pile of ruins on the corner of Chelsea street from when a fire sent a neighborhood house to ashes. The ruins were never cleared from the property, even though there were still small structures left standing which were charred and caked with soot -- like end tables or bookshelves. Sometimes the adventurous kids in the neighborhood would dare each other to venture into the ruins and confront the dreaded canine, but no person could get within an inch of the ashes without the dog attempting to bloody them up.

"When my parents were gone one evening, off to a late-night movie as something they dubbed "date-night," I had ridden my bike around town for some fresh air, until I came across the ruins on the corner of Chelsea street and stopped abruptly. I could see the large backside of the dog rising and falling in slumber underneath the covering of a few wooden planks; and it suddenly occurred to me that the beast which the town kids had always spoken ill of with terror laced in their voices was merely an animal, a dog which had perhaps had trouble finding a place where he felt truly comfortable.

"And though it probably wasn't a smart decision, I biked up to the edge of the ruins and admired the dog from a distance: its lumbering body covered in coarse caramel hair, its claws untrimmed and caked with dirt, its legs twitching slightly in its sleep as it dreamed of running, running away from here and to a pasture filled with grass where he could play without being disturbed by those who looked at him as if he were only a savage. As his legs galloped in imaginary freedom, I thought to myself, I want to touch him, I want to train him and play with him and see the lights glowing lively and bright behind his eyes."

"What did you do?" T asked, opening her own eyes which I hadn't noticed were closed.

"I decided not to do it," I replied, drifting in a dream-like state. "I got too scared that he would hurt me and turned back around on my bike to go home."

T's eyebrows turned down sullenly. She was quite fond of animals, despite having not interacted with any in her homeland. When she pet a dog for the first time, she nearly burst with a feeling she said was similar to "when you wake up to rain," as she had done one morning after spending the night at my apartment. I remembered how her eyes, which already seemed to glow with some otherworldly flare, blazed with exhilaration that was strictly earthen and beautiful.

"A few weeks later, the dog died," I continued slowly. "Apparently it had picked up some diseases from living in the ruins for so long and drinking contaminated water. The whole neighborhood seemed to rejoice at his passing, but I only felt sorrow. I knew I had wasted my chance to do something that might have changed that dog's life just because I was scared. And yeah, maybe the dog would have hurt me if I tried to cross it, but it was only when I realized I missed the dog that I knew I had felt some sort of affection for it. Some sort of love."

This seemed to intrigue T, as the corners of her mouth lifted into a sort of half-frown.

"What is it?" I asked upon reading her expression.

She let out a small breath that she had apparently been holding in. "That's horrible."

I waited for her to elaborate, listening closely. Every time she spoke, you could still hear the slight quirks of her tongue, the way she still hadn't quite gotten used to the mouth-feel of the English language. It was mesmerizing.

"It's horrible that you didn't understand you had loved the dog until he was gone. How sad it must have been for the dog, alone in the ashes."

I nodded along with her, glad that T was understanding where I was coming from.

"That's the thing about love," I told her reproachfully, casting a glance at the dancing fireplace. "Sometimes you don't realize how good things are until they're gone, and you have to live the rest of your life knowing that it could have been different if you weren't so scared."

She frowned. "I don't like that."

"No one does." I dropped my voice lowly, feeling a sort of nostalgia wash over my body. "But sometimes that's the only way we can learn how to keep the love we have. Through heartbreak."

The firelight waltzed upon her skin, casting flimsy gray shadows on her corporeal form. In this light, the abnormality of her nature was the most conspicuous. You could see how her skin was cratered like the moon, and almost grayish-blue, like the color of the sea on the brink of a storm. You could see that her hair fell in waves of something far smoother than human hair, like the finest of silks. You could see that the cupid's bow of her lips was curved the opposite way, arched upward so her mouth's smile curved oddly, but beautifully.

Softly, I took her hand and felt the smooth skin there again, but brought it to my lips all the same and kissed each knuckle. When I let her hand go, it lay limply in her lap as she looked down on it with confusion.

"That's one way we express love," I told her. "But I have another story to tell."

She laughed lightly and brushed her fingers over the spots on her knuckles which I kissed. Skin aglow, she nodded for me to begin. A smile bloomed on her face like those flowers in the garden which she tended to in her homeland, a place she talked about frequently as it brought her comfort and peace. Surrounded by hydrangeas, she would say. They're my mother's favorite. I planted them when she found her Wings and departed, leaving me with the smell of flowers to remember her by. When I see her flowers, I think of the image of her gliding into the sun with a shiny pair of feathered wings upon her back, and I feel happy.

The memory of T talking about her mother made me remember a moment with my own.

"My mom liked flowers too, but she liked to stitch them into quilts. We used to have a number of large blankets in our house with dozens of roses, daisies, forget-me-nots, and hyacinths patterned into the fabric. Usually, my mom would sell them to the other mothers in our town, knowing she could bargain a considerable price for her beautiful handiwork. My mother was skilled beyond words, but I always asked her why she sold her blankets instead of just giving them away. She told me that she needed the money to support us, having to raise both my sisters and me by herself after my father died. I was content with the answer, knowing well that my mother worked hard to keep us living well.

"The holidays came, which meant that my mother worked overtime in her bedroom, sewing blooming flowers into quilts and pricking her fingers with needles until they were raw. On Christmas day, my sisters and I walked with our mother around town delivering the special quilts to the customers who ordered them, and receiving change in return. Mother had a fat sack full of money by the time her rounds were nearly done, and vowed to buy us a full chicken to cook for Christmas dinner. The wind was biting cold that day, but the promise of good food and laughter filled us to our toes with warmth.

"We had just one more delivery to go until we could embark home and begin to play with the gifts that our mother gave us, little trinkets that we knew costed little, but were pleasant all the same.

"But when a stout man in a black suit answered the door, our mother found out that the little old lady who had ordered the quilt had suddenly passed away just the night before from the cold. Stricken, our mother thanked the man and turned to us, tears in her eyes. Too late, our mother had said quietly. I was too late.

"My sisters and I tried to cheer her up, but the life seemed to be knocked out of her. Dazed she was, as she ventured up the hill to our little house surrounded by dirt and dying flowers which my mother couldn't remember to water. However, she tripped over something loose hanging on the ground and realized that we had stumbled into the residence of a homeless woman on the street. She was bundled from head to foot in clothes that were muted in color, but not inherently in smell for they emitted an odor of something lost. Something that wasn't where it was supposed to be.

"After my mother had apologized to the poor woman, she suddenly became aware, as the woman reached out to grasp her hand in forgiveness, that this woman was shaking from the intense cold. Mind suddenly sharp, my mother swiftly lay the quilt she had been carrying over her arm onto the poor woman, bundling her up against the temperature. The woman's eyes sprouted tears in appreciation, and I remember my mother saying, 'God took one woman away to his Kingdom so I could have a second chance at saving another.'"

While I was speaking, T had fingered the fringe of the blanket draped around her own shoulders, perhaps thinking about the woman homeless on the street and how the cloth she was wearing on her skin could be just enough to save someone else.

"My mother needed money from her quilt-making in order to support our family," I told T as she was still lost in thought. "But it turned out that the love she felt when giving that woman one of her creations for free was the best sort of currency that she could ever receive."

"Your mother loved that woman?" inquired T. "Did she kiss her hands too?"

I uttered a breathy laugh at her beloved innocence, and leaned over to kiss T on the forehead. "No, T. It's a different type of love. My mother's love for her was more like kindness. Like caring for someone else because they need the help."

T looked shocked. "How many types of love are there?"

I shook my head in disbelief. "Too many to count. But it exists, trust me. At least on earth, love exists."

Raising my eyes to T nestled in her blankets before me, a creature of tranquility, I suddenly became sure of something. Something that stirred a ripe feeling in my chest and made a nerve in my neck throb with emotion. Like my body had been awakened for the first time.

"T?" I asked quietly.

She looked up. I took in her raven black hair hanging in curls around her face, the cocoa hue of her pretty skin and the eyes -- those eyes which seemed to hold the sun and the moon and every constellation in the night sky. Her eyes, which seemed to carry the history behind every piece of dust in our universe, congealed into a single living, breathing being.

T stopped playing with the blanket's threads. "What is it?"

"Do you think you could love me?"

The question seemed to take her by surprise, but as soon as it left my mouth, I knew it was completely unfair. How could you expect someone physically incapable of love to love you the way you wanted them to?

But her answer seemed to convey something else.

"There's one thing I noticed about this place when I first came down to see you," she began with an air of wisdom. "Earth is filled with so many different types of people and emotions and colors and sounds, and they all manage to coexist together like a big machine. In this place, I thrive," she emphasized, a newer passionate light taking to her kaleidoscope eyes. "It feels almost like a dream, to be able to touch and see and taste and hear. And if I'm able to do all of those things here, I think I should like to have emotions too. To feel."

I locked eyes with her by force of habit and found myself floating away again, but this time I didn't care. She spoke that last word with such fervor that she seemed near combustion with some type of newer, brighter energy. The kind that you can only find inside an atomic blast.

"Do you ... do you think you could love me?"

Hesitant. Biding. My heart raced marathons in my chest.

She screwed together her eyebrows again and focused on her hands, as if trying to figure out what her bones looked like under her skin. Something was brewing here between us. The energy was hot and it pulsed with a lively rhythm like that of a concert pianist.

It was a long time before she responded, but I realized later that I would have waited a thousand years if I would have known that she was going say her next words.

"I think I already do."

Within the cabin's cozy, wooden interior, the fireplace finally drove out all the traces of the winter chill and replaced the atmosphere with tendrils of warmth. Warmth and a hint of something, something sweet and earthy and which brought to the mind memories of laughter and first kisses and the feeling you get when you wake up next to someone you love.

The fragrance of blooming hydrangeas.