How can a heart that is broken still beat? This is a question that I have spent many nights contemplating, searching my cottage-cheese ceiling for the answer, a question that spins and thrashes within the human mind. It never should have happened. Not all things should, but they do. It should never hurt so badly or make you cry so much, you should never live to tell the tale. But life goes on. It tends to be like a friend who really wants to go somewhere, but you just don’t feel up to it, but yet you find yourself being dragged along for the ride by your collar anyway. That’s just how it goes. It was a clear night, so clear and clean that I lay down in the grass outside of her condo and stared up at the sky and the stars and the clouds and the moon. It was so beautiful, dark blue crushed velvet, crushed California sky velvet. I found myself reaching up to that crushed California sky velvet, trying to pull myself up into the abyss. Like an abandoned child who reaches for a mother who is not there, my call also went unanswered. We were just being typical teenage girls. Her parents were gone until the sun would have already risen, and she was hoping to have her love at her house in her arms on the black leather couch. I was hoping to have the same. River was his name. What a walking statement of contradiction. I now vehemently insist that he is the descendent of a certain infamous Dr. Jekyl. But, what a Greek god he was. Standing at a lean (and slouchy) 6’2, with a body that no girl could ignore when it was shirtless, shaggy blonde hair that told tales of endless beach days, a smile that was like the sunrise, bright and beautiful. He had grass green eyes so gorgeously blended and perfected with that blonde hair, it was difficult to say he was, to say the least, gorgeous. His eyes were the pinnacles of his teenage perfection: that grass green would change to blue, a faded jean blue with his mood. It wasn’t just his male model beauty that sent me diving straight into the deep end without learning first how to swim. It was his mind. He had an aura of simple joy that drew me to him. We would spend endless hours logged on the phone, discussing every thing from heartbreaks to fathers that break promises, to music to books to everything in between. He left the pessimist in me speechless, and soon that pessimism faded away like an old photograph. The bottom line: He matched my intelligence how my friends had never even managed to. I’ll always remember something he said to me. “You’re so smart. Flaunt that, and people will never mess with you because they’ll know that they can’t.” There is always a good and a bad side to everything, though. Adolf Hitler’s secretary maintains that he was never cruel or mean or malevolent to her, but yet he still found it in him to exterminate 6 million Jews. River’s bad side was that he was not just a wise 16 year old, but a hormonal one. One with alcohol and drug use problems, but he wouldn’t say problems. He would say, “enjoyment.” this is a story that i'm writing for english class. tell me what you think.