I thought she was beautiful because she saw the world in close-up. We watched the sun set in the Outer Sunset and even though it was scarf weather, we ordered frozen hot chocolate and sat in the damp sand and played with the bleached crab carcasses. She didn’t marvel in contradiction like I did. The way the sky is both colorless and impossibly blue. Everything was beautiful to her. Joy and sadness were not opposites. Art was not distinct; it was in all we created. I loved her for that, because I was obsessed with finding meaning in beauty. Emotions, I thought, should serve a purpose. They should be stories, and they should be remarkable. And when she left I realized I’d mythologized her, like the sky, and that day on the beach, and the real story was not in the seeing but the looking.