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She

by Shi Y, Arizona, USA, Age 16

She was born with an olive, a nightstick, a fat leg of lamb. She cut an interesting figure, a silhouette against the black night—almost invisible but for her crisply pressed edges. For all that I knew her, I never knew more than that vaguely white periphery. She had learned early on that life was a mystery, and she had decided not long after that to master it. She had perfected the science of intrigue with only minimal effort, and devoted the rest of her energy to traipsing across the minds of the sensible, leaving a ruinous wake of disbelief, wonder, and longing, disregarded far behind her.

I told her once what I thought of her—how I suspected her affected graces, how I hypothesized, she was no more enigmatic than any other phenomenon. She tinkled her delicate laugh in my face, dangling it in front of me like a cow bell. “Oh, Jerry!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know? Science is, as a rule, no more than: an excuse for the way of the world. If you weren’t such a scholar you might actually glean some wisdom from your surroundings; you’d rather examine a single blade of grass under your microscope, and miss out on all of creation as it happened in the filed.” She tinkled again, gleefully, only sharpening the barb on her words. “You’ll never understand me, Jerry! Not even if you were Adam and I were one of your ribs; the act of attempting to establish my character ensures your failure, because I am no more than an illusion in your world of theories and laws! I am nonsense! I am a protist, an other, a being of fantasy, of fiction or religion. Choose the description that pleases you most; I could be nothing at all, and remain the same. Ah, Jerry, I fear you will never understand.”
She was right about that. I struggled onward in the very face of her predictions of futility. I valiantly invented explanations for her quirkiness—childhood trauma? an unconscious desire for attention? loneliness? starlight essence?—and I formed a million hypotheses, and devised experiments for them all. Invariably, I would fail, and I would never know a single thing more than I did the night I vowed to prove her wrong.

Eventually I conceded defeat; soon after, she drifted out of my life, leaving me perplexed even in her absence. Was she the subject I had always searched for? Was I insane to let her leave, when I could very well have been on the brink of a crucial discovery? It was only year later, in the height of my senility, that I realized I had been wrong all along, and that she of course had spoken only directly and truthfully, for she never deceived. But even then, I could not give up, and I felt almost sure that all of her seeming mystique was imply the creation of my own boyish fantasies.