Nights

When I met her, she was 21 and lived only by night.
I remember she had beautiful eyes, but I can never recall what was their exact colour. Maybe a purplish gray or simply a pale blue. She told me how her eyes were so light the sunlight always hurted her, but she was not an albino. She was just fragile.
She told me how the only natural light she'd see was the twilight; after that the city lamps would turn on and the sky became a pitch-black and she went to sleep hours before dawn. She had to sleep a lot more than most people, she told me, but I can't recall why. Maybe she never said.
I liked her because she was intelligent. We talked about art and History while we walked through the city streets. I remember thinking she was too pretty, too fragile, too smart for our world. Walking with her felt strange and I found myself constantly touching her hand to make sure she was real.
I never asked her what she did for a living or who she lived with. To be honest, I didn't ask her anything personal. I left the city the next morning with the phone number of a girl I had spent the night talking to and knew nothing about, except for the fact that she liked Magritte and avoided the sunlight. I never called her.
I was in my late twenties. I actually thought that if I had ever married, it would've been to her. But as soon as I started wondering what'd say if I called her, I gave up on it.

A night, about three years after I met her, a famous photographer saw her and immediately considered her as the most beautiful woman in the world. They had a photoshoot and he made a public exposition of her pictures. People came from all around the world to see Louise Swain, the perfect girl. She was adored. I'd see her everywhere, for months: magazine covers, random advertises, television.
I didn't try to reach her. I still had the folded paper with her phone number in my desk drawer and I never took it out. Sometimes I'd read an interview where she'd tell how her parents died when she turned 19, leaving her a huge amount of money, and she had lived alone since then, or how her childhood best friend had once beaten her. Everything that I know about her past, I learned in those magazines.
No one would get tired of her. She was loved and wanted and envied. She was not a role model: she was the role model. Why, I didn't know. She never did a thing.
Almost an year after the photographer found her, someone else did. No one knows why Joshua Knaggs shot her, since he turned himself in right away. But the damage was done: Louise Swain was dead and the whole country mourned her death, sponsored by the national television.
I didn't cry when she died. I watched the images of her happy and alive on television and felt nothing at all. That was when I realized that that was not the woman I had met. That person on the television was a completely stranger. It was impossible to picture her discussing surrealism under the city lights on a deserted street.

The sad truth is that every time I look at Magritte's The Ignorant Fairy all I see is a woman with light eyes.


O narrador parece um homem ou mulher? :x
Era suposto ser um homem...