He noticed her from across the street. It was not the first time he had seen her, with her flowing chestnut- brown hair and her acoustic guitar. He would watch her sometimes, watch her fingers stroke the strings lovingly, strumming both unfamiliar and nostalgic patterns. But that was not why he had been following her for months, or had it already been a year? When she sings...he sighed in remembrance. She was his muse, but he would never tell her this because he had never spoken to her. He lacked the courage.
There was so much pain and emotion in that intense parcel of hers. Her compact body hunched over her cheap instrument, the music pouring out of her in spasms. Anything he would say would disrupt the effect, lessening the potency of her power over him, power she did not even know she had.
He was drinking coffee at one of the tables with their flimsy, insufficient umbrellas outside the café by his workplace that day. It was monotonous, that street, just one of the many making up the busy hubbub of his metropolis home. The city the provider of his dun coloured reality; stuck in a dead-end job, just one of the many cubicle occupants in an arbitrarily storied, impersonal building. A fortuitous occurrence really, when she showed up, a splash of wet paint violating the world of black and white he has always known. Was she some kind of hippie? He did not know, nor did he care. For all he knew, she was an angel descended from heaven in flesh, sent to wash away his sins of apathy, the depravity of the modern life.
***
She was sitting on the park bench even though there was a bum already sleeping on it, a newspaper over his face to shield from the midday sun. The bum did not seem to mind, none of them really feel entitled to care anymore and most were really quite friendly once you gave them what they wanted: privacy, a shot, some change. She was not the type to though; she was too unearthly for that. There was not a stain on her unwritten, white frock.***
She was his secret, one he might have shared with friends if he ever had any. There are those he called buddies of course, but all they ever wanted was to get drunk after work at some bar, hook up with some random girl and end up wasted in the morning, hung over with less money in their pocket. He wanted to be better than them, but he was not, not by a long shot. She was the only thing in his life that seemed right, and that was the way he wanted to look at it. He never found her at the same place twice, but he would see signs of her everywhere. The slippers she was wearing that first day he had found left behind beside a pond once. It was just a tiny affair, that pond, a mockery of a lake situated in the city core, a reminder of actual oases in Eden-like places far from there. He had seen people bathe their feet in it in the scorching days of summer but no one does that anymore. It was rumoured that this was where the homeless would come to urinate at night; that was why the water was always so yellow. He returned to the park bench every day in the week after he first met her, but she never showed. Then he restricted himself to every Tuesday, the day she was there. She was like a flash of lightning, showing up just the once to illuminate the greyness of everything around him, leaving behind no visible trace in the barren landscape.***
The next time he met her was entirely a coincidence. He had sunk back into his life of debauchery, the wanton madness of being at different clubs, leaving with different painted women, doing things with them he would never remember in the morning, things he never wanted to remember. These nights left no visible trace of sin on his exterior, but he could feel his soul being carved away from him with a penny knife, leaving deliberate holes like Swiss cheese. As if he had a soul, as if souls were something substantial, whose absence could be felt. She was swaying on the makeshift stage with her guitar, there was no way she was not drunk or high. The white of her dress hurt his eyes but the overhead strobe lights made a mockery of it. It scorned her purity, smothering her in unclean, multi-hued tints. No one was allowed to be saintly here; you were a saint if you paid and cleaned up after yourself, and that was that. He downed a couple of drinks before he decided he had enough courage to confront her, but she was already gone, perhaps dragged off the stage? There was no sign of a struggle.***
He had seen her many times since then, or heard rumours of her at least. She had cut and dyed her hair, or was it dyed before? He almost did not recognize her, but then she opened her mouth and cast her spell over him anew. Is it possible that this entity with the tangled blonde hair was who he had been looking for, the ever elusive one? He loitered under the extinguished street lamp and watched her ensconced in a niche behind the public toilets. A little girl was selling balloons to passersby. She could not be old enough to work yet, not on these streets surely? He bought all the balloons from her and said he will give her an extra dollar if she gives the balloons to the nice lady sitting over there? She looked at him as if he was crazy but did as she was told. She could not have been more than nine.***
She took the balloons in her hand, the one that normally strummed the chords, but did not hold the strings quite hard enough. It was inevitable that she would let go after she had lost one. The balloons drifted heavenward slowly, each string undulating goodbye to those of us left on earth, anchored by the burden that was gravity. He did not know what he had hoped to achieve with that. He watched her vacant blue eyes continue to gaze upwards as he made his way across the street towards her. By the time he was there, she was gone. Not even an impression on the stone to show she was there.***
He never saw her again after that. An earring here, another lost girl wearing a similar white frock; reminders or was he just lusting after her too plaintively? He thought he knew the wooden guitar in the pawnshop window, like a lost appendage that had been abandoned indecently in the middle of the highway after a road kill. Maybe he was thinking too much. Better to drown himself in Scotch and whiskey at night again, was that not just the harsh reality of things? Bottles would never lie to him, would never leave him. Even his feet tripped him up as he tottered down the steps of the pub on unsteady, liquefied limbs. Before he knew it, his face hit the pavement, but met not the hard gritty surface but something that crinkled unexpectedly. He gaped in drunken stupor at the rendering of the girl on the front page and cried.***
He had found her at last, but he had found her too late. 
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