There’s a last time for everything, this we know to be true. A last time you will walk out of your front door, your head hung low after a particularly rushed morning due to a broken alarm clock. A last time you will give your dog a pat on the head or take him for a walk. There’s even a last time you will see the moonlight, or go for a walk on the beach and feel the sand in our toes.

I guess the real problem is, when we love someone we don’t think it will ever end. I mean we might think they could break up with us, but we never expect to really lose them. Do you know what I mean? We don’t imagine wondering who they actually are. Or how they became that way, because we think we know a person that we love. Or should I say, we think we love them, because in the end no one really knows what they’re doing.

See, that’s how it was with Alex. I was in high school, junior year, and there was this new kid. That’s how it always is, have you noticed? There’s always some new kid, because I guess kids who are always there don’t exactly send chills of excitement to the core of your soul. Expressly in a small town, like where I grew up. No one was a mystery, and no one had been since kindergarten. That was just how things worked out.

But Alex, Alex brought something to Arthur Kentucky that we had never seen before. He had black hair, like the color of letters on a computer screen. And that’s what his skin was like, letters on a computer screen. It was exactly that white, so pale that in the sunlight you felt like you could look right through him and see straight to the other side. When he got angry, I would later learn, his veins popped out from his skin so far that you could make out the blood pulsing through with each pump of his heart.

He had these eyes too, so blue you can’t even imagine. It was like the color of a neon blue sign on the Las Vegas strip. But Alex would never be caught on the Vegas strip, no! He wasn’t into partying, and at the time I found this sexy. The combination of his eyes and the hair, and the eerie skin made him impossible not to look at. If you saw him coming up the street you would have to turn and look, he was just like that.

You know that kind of person? Where you don’t want to stare but you just can’t avoid it. It’s almost like Alex had strings on all of their heads, pulling them in to his snow colored skin.
And the longer you looked the more you noticed. He had freckles on his hands and feet, but nowhere else. I used to laugh at this when we were cuddled up together. I would ask him if he only tanned his feet and his hands, and we would both giggle at the thought of him sitting with just his feet and his hands stuck out in the sun, like planks as he remained under shelter.
Then there were his legs, which were covered in little scars all over. At first everyone was afraid to ask him what they were from. We felt rude to do so, like we were acknowledging something different about him. What we didn’t know was that he craved that. Alex wanted to be different because it made him feel special. I don’t know what his reasoning was, but who ever really knows when it comes to boys?

Anyway, I eventually learned what was wrong with his legs, just like I learned everything else there was to know about him. It all came together, like one big puzzle, and I was so proud when I put the puzzle together that I failed to notice the way some of the pieces didn’t fit.
Junior year Alex and I first met, but it wasn’t until the year was coming to a close, SAT test’s taken and hopeful college applications sent in, that anything really happened between us. It wasn’t until we were both forced together, that we realized there was a spark. Maybe it was just in my head, the spark, or maybe it was real, but either way I believed in it, and that’s why I fell so hard for Alex during those last days of Junior year.