Two Faces

She was two.  She was one. Her smile, her façade left me dizzy.  Everyone saw her, she was a bad ass and everyone knew it.  They worshipped it, or they hated it.  She was a punk bad ass that could kick anyone's ass anywhere she pleased.  She was brash and harsh, always mocking.  NO one ever pictured her as anything but strong and hard, a statue carved from granite.
By accident I stumbled on the Artist.  The softness she hid away.  It was a paper that floated out of her bag and onto the floor one day.  I was going to hand it back, honest, but a quick glance revealed words of such power, that right there in the hallway my breath froze.  Longing, pain, hate, love, wistfulness, sadness, anger: all those human emotions everyone thought she didn't have were there, opened up for me on paper and on a web address.
I'd lusted after her body, wanted to be the one at her side while she ran after that ever allusive adrenalin high through streets crowded and dangerous.  Wanted to understand why she needed that rush, why drugs would never be enough.  I'd wanted to feel those muscles under my hands, those callouses against my skin.
Now I wanted to see the flesh and blood, because now I understood.  She ran and fought and bled and struggled because that was all that was left, because without an outlet for all the painful, too real emotions she'd burst open, because she was afraid to show someone what was really in her head and now everything was to sharp, she needed to world dulled into sharp adrenaline focus and nothing more, because her brain would never shut up and her soul would not let her sleep.
She was the badass and she was the artist.  They were not separate, they were one.  I saw it when she ran, the art of her movement.  In her writing even at her weakest moment, the strength flowed from her mind, always unbreakable.  I fell in love with a girl of two faces, because I wanted nothing more than to see them both, and to finally silence the keening in her soul.