)The second I walked into the shop, I knew. I knew by the way she stood with stooped shoulders, her back to me, staring listlessly at the headless statue that no one had wanted. He was not with her. She turned around at the little tinkle of the bell, and our eyes met. They were not the bright blue eyes, sparkling with life and mirth that I had seen before. They were bottomless pools of naked pain. They filled with tears and she walked hastily out of the shop.
I would always remember them as the two most interesting people I have ever seen. Interesting isn't even the right word. They were two stars on Earth, two roses in a garden full of dead, cracked leaves and weeds. I've seen teenage couples before, one too many. The boys hold their girls close, all the while winking at their friends, as if the girl is not a person at all, but a prize, a piece of meat. The girls force themselves to giggle, wearing practically nothing, pretending to enjoy themselves, but it doesn't take a genius to know they're not happy. But these two were different. They came to the junk shop as often as I did, maybe more. That was the first thing that caught my eye. Why would two teenagers be in a junk shop, instead of partying and drinking and ruining their lives the way their peers did? And it was not a one-time thing. I suspected they would go every day, or every week. Everytime I was there, so were they.
And it was astounding.
He would move from one item to the another, making up elaborate and ridiculous tales of how it came to be in the junk shop. She would giggle and 'correct' his 'egregious errors'. An emerald ring was actually a priestess' ring, a headless statue had once contained an evil spirit that had burst out of his – or her - prison and now roamed the world, while the chosen one hunted frantically for that same headless statue. The owner of the junk shop owner had become fond of them as well; he would just watch and smile and laugh. They were on their own plane, so detached from Earth, and so different from everyone else. They let me know there was God, or at least, a very strong force that had brought these two surreal, beautiful people together in love and joy and innocence and everything the rest of us have forgotten.
And then he was gone.
I am a reserved man, I am not the sort who would go introduce himself to his neighbors and promptly receive all the latest gossip. So it was ten years before I saw them again. Her again. I learned later that he had died, drowned while saving a child. Morbid as it seems, it was a fitting death for a person like him. To die doing something so noble and special. There was a little hitch in the story though; she had been left behind. She and I had shared a fleeting moment of understanding that day. I was perhaps one of the few who truly understood what he had been. What they had been.
So good beginning.
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