Near Love Stories
by J. B. Hogan

In that brief moment, as the young woman adjusted her gloves in the night air, looking up Arkansas Avenue away from the boy, he saw her in a lustrous, motionless still life. A pretty young woman in a pretty winter coat. Her hair appeared to be light brown and her face, in profile, was smooth and finely shaped with lovely high cheekbones and a soft, rounded chin. The boy absorbed her grace and beauty in stunned awe.

From the scarf she wore around her neck to her stylish winter boots, to the boy she was - though probably no more than 21 years old - the essence of a grown, mature woman, beautiful and in her prime. Her face glowing in the light - her cheeks flushed with cold and youthful vigor - her lips a soft red, her skin so white in the light, so soft and smooth looking, her expression of pleasant calmness, of self-assuredness; all of this, at that moment to the boy, in that cold, bright moment under the street light, made the girl the most wonderful thing he had ever seen in his life. She was - in a flash of powerful feeling, one that stirred within the boy a simultaneous mixture of emotional longing, lust, purity of motive, and love - a vision of ultimate desire, a desire of great depth, a desire unobtainable.

The boy ached with a melancholy and an exhilaration that commingled in his mind and heart. He wanted the girl, loved her without knowing her, wanted to know about her - where she came from, where she would go, what her life would be like. And then, after waiting for another car to go by, she crossed the street. He passed less than ten feet below her on the sidewalk but she never saw him. He paused at the base of the steps leading up to the campus and looked back, watched her until she disappeared in the dark of the night.

She was gone. Gone back to whatever world in which she lived, a world perhaps of sororities and fraternities, of money and nice homes, of comfort and ease. The boy, unfamiliar with such a world, huddled in his light jacket against the cold night air and without looking back again headed across campus and then doubled back towards the dark little house where he lived. The snow began to fall heavier then and the boy hurried on, hurried away from the bright beauty of the campus there on the hill above town, on the hill that seemed now far above him, far from where he lived just a few short blocks away, far from his own small home.

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