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The first day I met Bryce Loski, I flipped. Honestly, one look at him and I became a lunatic. It’s his eyes. Something in his eyes. They’re blue, and framed in the blackness of his lashes, they’re dazzling. Absolutely breathtaking.
My heart stopped. It just stopped beating. And for the first time in my life, I had that feeling. You know, like the world is moving all around you, all beneath you, all inside you, and you’re floating. Floating in midair. And the only thing keeping you from drifting away is the other person’s eyes. They’re connected to yours by some invisible physical force, and they hold you fast while the rest of the world swirls and twirls and falls completely away.
“A painting is more than the sum of its parts,” he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you’ve got magic.
“One’s character is set at an early age, son. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life.” He was quiet for a minute, then dropped the curtain and said, “I hate to see you swim out so far you can’t swim back.”
“Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss….” He turned to me. “But every once in a while you find someone who’s iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.”
“To be held above the earth and brushed by the wind,” she said, “it’s like your heart has been kissed by beauty.”
There was other stuff, too, like how something can be so much more than the parts it took to make it, and why people need things around them that lift them above their lives and make them feel the miracle of living.
By the end of that first day, what I’d made was a big mess. But if chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one’s universe, then I was well on my way.
“There’s nothing like a head-strong woman to make you happy to be alive.”
He wanted to know about the sycamore tree and seemed to understand exactly what I meant when I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s that way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it’s sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”
“Get beyond his eyes and his smile and the sheen of his hair—look at what’s really there.”
Maybe it was all how you looked at it. Maybe there were things I saw as ugly that other people thought were beautiful.
