The first time I met you, I was fourteen. You smelt like antiseptic wipes and the hospital. You were seated on my couch at three in the afternoon, with a cup of coffee in your hand. I assumed my brother had made it, judging by how thick it looked. Your eyes were particularly misty – almost cloudy. It was as though all the life your frail limbs could gather from the universe was captured in your pupils, and where moons died and suns lived with every blink of those eyelashes. I almost forgot to notice the lack of hair on your head. You were beautiful.

My brother most definitely would agree. After all, he talks to me about you every night. When my brother’s friends ask about you, he would describe how you smell like sunshine, how your eyes are as clear as the Dead Sea, how the scar beneath your bottom lip is shaped precisely like a crescent moon.

He fails to mention how sick you are – and how you absolutely do not smell like sunshine; but instead, you smell like disinfectant and heartache.

He neglects to mention the size of your chest, the width of your hips, and the length of your skirt – the apparently important details that are supposed to matter to eighteen year old boys with their heads above sea-level; but he has been holding his breath in ever since he met you.

The second time I met you, you finally told me your name. “Eve,” you said softly. You stood up from my brother’s bed, your long legs unfolding beneath you as an over-sized sweatshirt fell until your knees. It made you look small and lost, but I guess that was what you really were in a nutshell. You titled your head a little to the right and the dim lights shone on your bald head. And by normal standards, it should have freaked me out, just as sick people had always. But you were different. Instead, everything about you screamed out to me.

I did not have the chance to see you for the third time. All I knew was that you had done something. Something so grave and big that my fourteen year old mind could not comprehend. My brother had come home from the hospital with swollen knuckles and red eyes and he swore never to go back again.

I knew that both of you hated putting labels on things. You would be curled up against my brother’s lap and fiddling with your camera. He would place innocent pecks on your forehead. You loved him in ways you would love everyone else, but you were the only infinity my brother could ever bring himself to love wholesomely.

When my brother lost you, I lost my brother.