Bubblegum

I remember. 
Her hair was a bubblegum blue mess of shoulder length silk. She was a little crazy, but that's what made her fun.
Huddled in front of the open fire in a tangled embrace made the cold bearable, almost comfortable. The breeze brushed silently across our faces, her hair tickled under my nose. Burnt orange leaves danced, swirling about the park freely like butterflies.
For us and only us. 
Winter was well on its way and she completely reminded me of the approaching season. The blue eyes and hair, porcelain complexion, the knitted scarf that was casually thrown around her neck, the reindeer embellished jumper. 
We carried on holding each other, and breathed the outside in. 
Soon the hues of amber would give way to the unforgiving blues and greys and blacks.
Frost had already began to leak and seep its way through our skin, edging its way into muscle and bone. It seemed to fuse the joints together, making every movement an achingly rigid, clumsy and numb battle. I didn’t want to imagine what it would be like in just a few weeks.
'Can we go?', she murmured, her breath pushing its way to my chest. 
I’d had enough too, it was late; clouds had slowly filled in the sky like puzzle pieces and the moon had sunk like a candle’s flame.
The rest of that day is simply lost to time, faded, like a battered photograph pulled from some aged family album.
The last looming months of the year always brought back this memory. An innocent time from an ancient world.

I opened my eyes. I was hunched over my desk, vacantly staring into a mug of tea that would no doubt now be cold. I'd have to make another. As I stood pushing back my chair, the various shelves that adorned my wall stared down at me. Isn't it funny. So much life, so many feelings and memories, could be traced by glossing over the CD's, the vinyl, the paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, VHS tapes, scattered SD cards and harddrives. They all captured who I was, and who I now am. Left like journals from a soon to be forgotten time.
And yet none of them would tell her story.

So, I'll start with when I met her.
Freshers washed through the unadorned, eggshell white halls of the campus buildings like clumps of sheep. 
I'd passed into second year, I spent my time in lectures writing stories, so I’ve no idea how.
It was Freshers week, class was pretty empty, students dozing off their hangovers. Many seemed to take drinking as an occupation. That vain effort to delay the real world from becoming too real, the screaming of angry alarm clocks and bratty bosses.
She rushed in as frantic as my handwriting, dropped her bag and threw herself into the chair next to me, rocking it backwards onto two legs. 
The first thing I'd noticed was her hair, recently dyed blue, freedom in a world free from parents views.