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when we were first getting to know each other i would ask her about herself, you know, what her favorite things were. she would suck both her lips into her mouth, roll her eyes up, like she was thinking so amazingly hard. like she had never thought about it before. every answer started with "it's a tie between..." because she hated having favorites. and she said she was indecisive or pathologically eclectic, but i think it was just the way she loved, a million different things for a million different reasons. sometimes you crave chocolate and sometimes you crave curried vegetables, but if at each of those times that thing that you crave is what you want most in the world... that sort of logic. it was that once she loved something at all she never forgot, and love was an obligation to her, a vow, even when it came to inanimate objects, even when it came to ideas. to say it once meant ad infinitum. there were varying degrees of intensity, but the foundation was always the same.

anyway, i was saying, for a long time i felt like i wasn't going to know her. i didn't see how i could make any progress if she wasn't ever going to give me a straight answer. i think a lot of people made that mistake.

autumn had a boyfriend once, when she was five or six. from what i understood it was her only successful romance. it lasted for over a year, and then the boy was kept back in first grade. i guess you can only be so loyal to a girl you can't even count on seeing at recess. she said after that she went through a period of infatuation with gobo fraggle. gobo was an orange felt puppet on a children's t.v. show where he and other felt puppets lived underground beneath a man's house. he had purple hair. i know what you're thinking because i thought it too. i don't think it anymore, but this was in the beginning, remember.

she said it, and then she thought for a second. she didn't laugh like i'd expected her to. "it was kind of...i don't know. i knew he wasn't real, but i didn't? i think i knew it. maybe i had no idea. i had trouble with that, when i was small. there wasn't really a strong divide in my mind, between this world and other worlds, so a lot of the time my world was sort of, you know, in between? i had a whole mess of cartoon crushes. my very first, i was, like, two, it was speed racer. the original one, you know, that japanimation cartoon? i mean, i don't remember so much about him. but i remember when i was in love with peter pan, and i drew little hearts around all his pictures in this story book i had. and then lionel, from the thundercats. maybe a smurf. oh, and robin hood! the fox from the disney movie? i adored him. but when you're little, you know, and cartoons and talking animals and that stuff, it's what you see, and seven-year-old boys are, like, so useless, or at least they're pretty mean, i mean, what did i care if gobo was human or not? he seemed a lot nicer than any boy i knew. there was a hole in my bedroom floor, and i used to wish and wish that he would come up through it and take me with him. i would sit staring at it for hours."

she still hadn't laughed, and i had stopped being sure about whether i wanted her to. her forehead scrunched up the way it did when she was untangling a knot.

"fraggles were so tiny, though. i don't know how i thought i was going to fit through that hole. but if alice could manage it, right? i mean, those things work themselves out."

she wasn't even talking to me anymore. i never knew where she was when she got like that. she just went away. there was nothing in me capable of following her.

her favorite love scene: tie between the end of some fairy tale she'd read called "the light princess" and the final goodbye between christopher robin and winnie-the-pooh.

her favorite color: all of them, and especially green.

her favorite author: tie between lewis carroll and william faulkner. but her favorite books weren't written by them.