A Story Unimportant

There once was a girl in a yellow sundress whose name is unimportant, but she is. There once was a boy whose name was also unimportant, but he was much more sensibly dressed for the November weather in a fleece-lined jacket. However, the pinnacle of unimportance was the fact that they were strangers in a hotel in some rather bustling city. The girl knew that being strangers was the pinnacle of unimportance because she had never met a stranger. She proceeded to waltz her way over to the boy with a crooked grin and warmth in her eyes uncharacteristic for the chilly day. The boy glanced up just in time to be amazed by the fire in her stare (amazing because it never burned anyone) and to hear her as she said, “Hey there, where are you from?”

I’m sure he answered, but his answer was as boring as the grey world he lived in, so neither of them felt the need to pay much attention to it. His face was pretty and so were his words, and her face was unique and so were her words, so they quickly struck up a good conversation. That lasted only a little while before the girl needed change again,

“How do you feel about adventures, Curls?”

Curls was a reference to his hair.

“Adventures?”

“I’m proposing the grandest sort; I’ll give you a name and you’ll give me one, and we’ll learn this town as though it was a history lesson and then we’ll part ways at the end of the day.” Her grin was in full power, and he could tell that she was a politician or a persuasive speaker just by the way that he couldn’t turn her down even if he’d wanted to. It was something in her face.

“Sure,”

“Theo’s your name for the day. What’s mine gonna be?”

“Theo’s rather elegant, isn’t it? Presidential? Today you are Rose, I suppose.” It had taken him a little deliberation and a rhyme.

And away they went. They had coffee in front of large windows, toured a museum, had coffee again this time by a rosebush, Theo lost Rose once, they had lunch, he bought her a rose from a stand, she bought him a teddy bear (“Don’t you know teddy bears were named after Theo Roosevelt?” “Presidential then.”), Theo lost Rose again, Theo realized that it’s awfully hard to keep track of a butterfly in her garden and that really is what she was, Theo surprised Rose by taking her hand (“I kept losing you,” this was mumbled), they took pictures on a pier, they got ice cream, they danced to the sound of wind, they found their way back to the hotel, they had dinner, and then Rose surprised both of them by kissing Theo on the cheek. Rose however was the only one to hold up the deal and when Theo asked her for her actual name (“Isn’t this name as actual as any other?”), she staunchly turned him down and fled the scene.

Rose took off the next morning on a mission to conquer the world or sit in a cubicle and watch it pass her by, it was difficult to know which. They never saw each other in waking hours again. However, many years later, after a few scandals and sorrows and sleepless nights, after Theo had gotten married and his wife had had a child, Theo’s wife was so very curious as to why he was so insistent on naming their new daughter Rose. And the knotted black curls that bounce on his child’s shoulders as she blows bubbles in his backyard feel like a new form of story and this time he knows even going into it that every moment will be important.