She said that I could call her May.
May- the fifth month of the year, containing 31 days.
I just shrugged and kept on walking, because that’s all I could think to do.
I didn’t say anything, because what was there to say? If she wanted to be called May, which by the way was a season and not a name; it was her problem, not mine.
She had pink hair and the weird habit of wanting to be called May and I was the guy who wore thick glasses, sat in the back of the class and handed in his homework a day before the due date. The movies have said everything that needs to be said on the subject: stick to the status quoe.
I swear it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I wasn’t supposed to be here, far away from home, with a girl I barely knew. Things weren’t supposed to be like this. I had everything under control, down to every last detail. That’s when it happened, the thing that messed everything up:
Love.



“Give me that” she snatched the essay from my hands and read it over quickly.
I looked at her face, even though there wasn’t much to see. She had a piercing sitting on her nose and her hair was light pink (which according to the school rules; is inappropriate in a scholar establishment). But I didn’t care. For a second there I didn’t care about anything else in that empty classroom; except her eyes. They weren’t particularly pretty, just a soft brownish gold; very common, nothing extraordinary. That wasn’t the point though. They looked lost, lost under all that dark eye-shadow and jet black eye-liner. They screamed at me; asking to be set free. But I couldn’t do anything but sit there, looking at those eyes and stare back at them helplessly.
“It’s awful” she said, handing it back to me.
I knew it was awful, I’d gotten a B from my teacher but I had the feeling it was more like a B for “Because I don’t want to screw up your whole average”.
But instead I smirked and said arrogantly: “Because you did any better?”
She gave me the essay and said: “How about you practice your essays instead of being a little arrogant jerk?”
Ouch.
She dropped the essay on my essay and walked away without turning around.
Just like that.



That night, three extra math assignments later, I finally sat down and read her paper. My first thought was “s***, I wish I’d written this”. Then I read it again and again: until I could find every grammar mistake I possibly could, making some up there and then as I went along. I highlighted and wrote in red until the paper looked like it had bled to death. Then I put it away proudly in my back-pack and went to bed.



I felt ashamed to give it back to her the next day when she asked for it. Slowly, ever so carefully, I took it out of my bag. I couldn’t bring myself to look into her eyes as I handed it back. I didn’t need to look into those empty eyes once again. I was afraid that somehow, if I looked into them, I’d get lost as well. I knew that it was stupid and scientifically impossible, but those eyes just made me forget everything I knew…
When I come to think of it, that is as stupid as a boy can get. It’s like hypnosis; only worse.
She looked at the deceased paper and smiled. It was half-way between a smirk and smile, but I like to believe that that was the moment she first smiled at me.
“Did that make you feel any better?”
I nodded slowly because suddenly I’d become stupid and incapable of speaking any known language.
“Walk me to class?” she said, grabbing my arm and leading us away.
“My name’s May, by the way”
I had no idea where we were headed, but for once, I liked the idea of not-knowing anything at all.
All I knew was that May was a season, not a name.



We’d only been friends for two weeks. At least, I like to think that we were friends although we never said it out loud. I learned many things about May. She could open a banana with her feet but she couldn’t whistle. I’d learned how to whistle as a baby, but I couldn’t quite remember when and how. Maybe I’d been a smart baby and learned it all by myself. That day, sitting in the meadow down by the river, I lost my patience. How could she be so pretty in that violet dress without being able to whistle?
“It’s not that hard May! You just have to put your lips together and whistle”
She was really trying, I could tell she was. I could tell just by the way she didn’t brush her hair away from her face when it fell, the way she usually did.
Suddenly, she stopped trying and she just looked at me. I couldn’t tell what she was about to say next. I knew that it would probably be something stupid and that I’d probably laugh stupidly, like I always did. I liked that. I liked that she brought that part out of me. Most girls make the good stand out of the guy; she mad the stupid stand out of the nerd. I liked it. I liked not having to think about everything before I even said it out loud. I liked not having to count every single one of my words, as if they were numbered or highly charged at my own expense. I liked the feeling of being free of saying something somewhat stupid and not always being so boringly perfect.
“I’ve got something else I can do with my lips…”
“What?” honestly, I was clueless.
As she started leaning in towards me all I could think about was the smell of her perfume and her heart-shaped lips.
That’s when she kissed me.
Everything went black, punctured by fireworks and the taste of vanilla chap-stick.
When she pulled away all I could think to say was:
“Oh that’s what else you can do with your lips…”
That was the day I realized she’d officially turned me stupid.



With May, there was no such thing as a normal date. No movies, no bowling alleys and no ice-cream parlor. But if there was one thing May liked, just like most teenage girls, it was the Ferris wheel. That’s where she took me on our first official date: the carnival. As soon as I’d finished paying the entrée fee; she’d grabbed my hand and ran all the way to that enormous wheel. No need to say that I was afraid of heights. No need to say that she forced me to go on it anyway.
I grabbed her hand and held on to it as the wheel started to turn and go up. She laughed and her hair fell in her face, just like it always did. I was happy. It was summer; I was sitting at the top of the Ferris wheel with a girl with pink hair and the name of the fifth season of the year.
I was happy.
“Look how everything looks so small and insignificant from up here. Everything is so small…” She repeated again.
“Technically, everything is still the same size, just further away.”
Facts are facts.
She smiled as if there was something that she understood and I didn’t and she pointed again:
“No look, from up here everything seems so far away. We’re on top of the world and nothing can bring us down.”
And in fact for a second there, I believed that nothing could.
Nothing could bring us down for those few minutes because we were infinite and out of reach.
Then the Ferris wheel would bring us down and May would beg me to climb back on.
And we would.




Summer ended and then by the time we got to September; May was gone. She’d disappeared, faded away. I’d know it was coming all along, I knew that flowers that blossomed as bright as May had, eventually faded away and died.
When school started again things were the same, only they weren’t. I wasn’t the same. May had changed me. Everything seemed brighter and louder.
I like to think that May was a mystery, but not any mystery; she was my mystery. She was imperfect, but somehow, I’d never felt the need or necessity to fix her. She was broken and I liked her that way. She was my only mistake, but she was the most beautiful mistake a man can ever make.
She was May; she was sunshine, flowers and vanilla chap-stick.
She herself was a Ferris wheel and I’d been her last passenger.