I didn't know how she could be so energetic this early in the morning.

Our first year together, I would avoid her and her freshmen friends, sitting in the very front of the bus in the morning to catch up on my beauty sleep. I could still hear her words bouncing around in my brain, though, and slowly they became part of my subconcious. By the end of that year, I wouldn't be able to sleep on the bus unless she was talking.
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Most of her conversations somehow wormed their way into my thoughts. I remember one conversation she was having about the clouds being like cotton candy. After a while, I realized the clouds were kinda like her.
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Sometimes, that first year, I would see her walking in the halls. My hand almost always twitched as if it wanted to say hi, but we were both never alone at the same time, and I wondered if she recognized me at all.

What I was most scared of probably was what she would see in me. Listening to her talk, day after day, week after week, made me feel like I understood who she was, both achievements and faults. I felt it would be unfair of me to suddenly launch myself into her life when she knew nothing while I knew more than I was supposed to. And even though I didn't know her full name, I had started to like her. What if she didn't like who I was?
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I ended up never actually meeting her.

I knew who she was, I think she knew who I was.

But neither of us made that first move past acknowledging the existence of the other.
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I wrote her a letter in my English class. The teacher had been friends with her parents for years and told us that she would appreciate the contact.

Her closest friends told me she had already given up.

So I told her not to. I told her that she was sweet, beautiful, and not as flimsy and full of fluff as others had said she was. I told her she was like that cloud, like the rain that poured down - solid rain that the earth needs, that nothing else can really replace.

She never got my letter.

She never heard my speech, four years later, as I graduated from college.

She never met me. And I never reached out enough, never tried hard enough to meet her.
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She is kinda like the cotton candy too. There's always the lingering scent, the lingering taste, the soft whispers of summer in my ear.

And for me, she was my high school years.

Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I hear her telling me not to be stupid. Sometimes, when I don't want to go to a social gathering, she tells me to reach out anyway.

And she's the reason I've never bought a car.

Because sometimes, when I'm riding the bus, I hear her laughter, hear her proclaim that everybody in this world should be happy. Sometimes, I hear myself joining in, telling her what I never did, meeting her for the first time.