like her lips were cinnamon

She looked like she belonged in old time movies. Her skin bagged around her eyes. It was something in the grains of her skin that blurred and left me wondering if she knew what she looked like. I told myself before I would never like a girl that hid herself in make up, but I liked what she hid. Even when she smudged her eyeliner, she looked like a queen.
“It smells like a lake of jasmine winter frogs,” she said one day. Everyone laughed. I saw her eyes blink and saw her short eyelashes stick together for longer than they had last time, and I knew it hurt her. Everyone looked for the Technicolor belly laughs, but she was giving them faded, pastel giggles. I wanted to hold her hand from the tips of my fingers that would touch her to my knees that would buckle in on their bony selves.
“Whatever,” she said. Her breath came out in the cold like she’d been smoking a cigarette and only then did she notice the absence of nicotine.
“Does anyone have a light?” I didn’t smoke. Someone else offered his lighter. It was metal, and I knew it would be cold against her fingers, but she never wore gloves. I exhaled. Maybe one particle of my breath would reach her hand and warm it in secret.
“What are you staring at?” And I could swear I heard her tongue caress the r’s, and glide gently away as the teeth took over for her delayed hiss, but instead of remembering to answer, I kept staring. I almost felt her lips part from mine, there in the dusk. She turned away on her heel and pulled up one leg of her tights that had been drooping.
In another universe I told her how beautiful she looked in red and the way I wanted her legs wrapped around me. In another universe I brushed the strand of blonde hair from her face and cupped her face in my hand. But in this universe, I watched her walk away with her arm linked through another man’s flannel jacket.
I went home and poured potato flakes into a bowl and ate them with cold water. I closed my eyes and pretended she’d walked home with me instead, and I wondered if she’d yell at me for eating cold, fake potatoes. Would she cook me something instead? But an apron wouldn’t fit quite right with her leather jacket.
“Get the fuck off the couch,” she’d say, for no reason. She wouldn’t really care. She’d yell just to hear the gravel in her voice. I’d get up from the couch. I got up from the couch and walked towards the ghost that danced in my mind, and I pushed it. She fell to the cold, wooden floor and a smile flashed across her face for the smallest moment. After all, it wasn’t every day that you could sincerely fall all the way to the ground.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask. I could see the faded sparkles in her eyes, like a universe flickering as it died, and I knew she’d liked the moment of excitement. I fell to the floor on my knees and felt the jolt of pain through my knee caps. I felt her soft hair beneath my wrist as I sat to comfort her.
But the house was empty.