A muse

Her boyish looks were strangely alluring to me. I had always been a sucker for beautiful long hair on women, soft and silky, smelling like heaven, always changing as the wind blows, the head moves, and that girlish playing the women do with their fingers and the hair. Not her. She had short hair, shorter than mine, and a slightly androgynous face that made me uneasy. Not that she was masculine, no, she wore delicate clothes and blouses that almost begged to be peeked under, and had a quiet way that seemed to come from a century ago. I wondered if the guy I often saw her with was her boyfriend or not. He didn't seem to care much for her presence, but her presence was so ethereal that it was probably easy to forget that she was around--if you didn't look at her and at her big green sparkling eyes. I don't know if she was oblivious to her beauty, or so used to it that she barely acknowledged it anymore. Or if she cut her hair like that and didn't wear make-up because she didn't like to be seen as a goddess of beauty. She seemed to live on these border lines; like her body, which was too feminine to be mistaken for a male, but still flat and lacking curves--this thinness that all women try to achieve, and they look sick instead of pretty. But in her it was alluring; it was as if God, when making her, had decided not to make the oil paintings that people are, but a light watercolor, delicately brushed so to be almost transparent, with her silhouette thinly suggested by the most delicate pencil lines possible, the graphite barely touching the paper; there was no need to exaggerate her features, to make her a perfect child-bearer with large hips, or a breast feeder with large breasts. She was a mixture of everything, but only suggestions, just thin memories; it was more what she could be than what she was. It was as if she was still a teenager well in her twenties, the soft lines of her face made it even more confusing. She was almost alien, with the slightly pointy chain, the delicate nose, the androgynous features, the way she moved. Perhaps she had studied ballet, that would explain her light movements, almost imponderable. She was like a ghost, now that I think of it. Quiet, ethereal. I can't remember her voice, maybe because I may have never heard it. I think she didn't have to talk, she could just be.