Practicalmadness

At my school there is a girl I like to look at.

Just that -- just looking -- and not in a sexual way or because I'm in love with her, think she'd be intriguing, no. She's an aspiring interior architect, for chrissakes. She's not grotesque; in fact, she's beautiful. Beyond beautiful, with long, slender everything (yet she still has breasts), smooth alabaster skin and impossibly high cheekbones.

She is, in fact, too beautiful to be alive. Her body is not sexy or desirable so much as it is reminiscent of the 'aliens' from the last 20 minutes of A.I.: like someone had proofread and corrected the human form until the result is aesthetically perfect, but so much so that it just doesn't feel right.

Hers is a body none should possess, not even herself. She is not human, and I look because I can't believe she actually manages to walk down Michigan Avenue without being blown into the side of a nearby building and snapped into pieces like a twig, or shattered like glass.

I cannot imagine lusting after her; I can't imagine sleeping with her, or how that would even work with her tiny toothpick frame. It isn't love; I know this because when I look at her -- these are stolen glances, of course; it would be rude to stare -- I don't feel at all self-conscious, because I don't care at all whether she's looking back.

But if I could look long at her without fear of seeming an asshole, I could imagine myself whispering notes into a tape recorder: "Hmm, I wonder what it eats..."

This girl is like a fine handbag -- think Prada, think Kate Spade on her best day -- or the latest, tiniest cellphone. She looks expensive and impractical, and she has to hide her arms in long sweaters or else not even she could imagine actually doing anything with them.