She always did love her projects. She’d get absorbed in the magic of making pushing designing creating new things and just forget who she was where she was oh do human needs food, now too?

It was always worth it in the end, she told herself. As a child these fits were only for a few hours for her, a few days, maybe a week. And she always made such beautiful new toys. Time didn’t pass, it disappeared and she rarely felt the desire to look for where to. In the moments after a project was finished, she looked like a druggie sated on his latest and greatest high; she looked like a nymphomaniac after the latest fantasy is fulfilled in that one shaking moment of pleasure; she looked like a china doll, glassy-eyed joy written across her perfectly innocent features. What she looked like, over that brilliant, jumping, lilting, crazy mind, was a little girl. A playful little girl who wasn’t always fully there.

Her projects consumed her. Work? She never had jobs where she worked for others. People? Her family barely registered, why should anyone else matter? And herself? If she worked, nothing else mattered. If she didn’t, the buzz of thoughts ideas sounds promises thoughts _{please just make it stop} plans would keep going and going and going and going in her _going head and drive to the _{going out of my mind} brink.

Two, three months pass, and suddenly her hair is longer again. Another few months and when her eyes catch a glimpse of her face, of her hair in a mirror, she doesn’t recognize herself and just keeps on walking. Only when she’s seen this stranger staring at her a few times does she look and realize those are her eyes now, and – Where did those streaks of gray come from? No matter. The project is almost done. Hair can wait people can wait everything can wait for that moment of completion.

She almost forgets why she does it sometimes. She almost loses herself in the hustle bustle motion movement of her plans projects ideas _going that she doesn’t remember who _{what she is} she is what she’s making or why. When she is making them for him for the object of her current obsession, for the muse who smiled and told her her work was interesting, for the man who is not here but who will surely come to see her work projects _{going insane} once they are finished _{surely he will be drawn to them?} She even forgets him, so much of the project in her head, drowning out the thoughts.

...

When he doesn’t come, she finds him. And even though he doesn’t recognize her _{doesn’t she look the same? No, she changed, didn’t she...} she forgives him and takes him and shows him her toys and waits for his smile. And though she knows it must be there she doesn’t see his smile _{he doesn’t really care about you} and so she works on more projects, talking to him now, showing him how she does it now, asking is he happy now.

Time goes and he still does not smile, even seems angry _{angry angry angry man} with her for keeping him from the world oh, now why would you want to go out there? And so she worries and cries and fears in secret under her bright flashing tiger smile as she tells him her final idea. He has never been so white and he must be so overjoyed with the blood running from his face to his heart from joy. Wheels turn and she makes it, makes it in him, makes the piece of the puzzle. Of course, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t realize this is all for him and for her to keep and treasure and love and tell her ideas to _{please give me someone to talk to} for his own good.

He is silent for seven months, she cries once in front of him, and he talks again.  She tends to him, watching it grow, making sure everything is fine _{cabbage patch gardener} and dandy _{sugar and spice} and that nothing will harm it _{ma petit choux-choux} because she loves it already.

Time disappears from her fingertips _{it’s not sand it’s seconds} runs away from her and before she blinks it’s done, her project is finished and it’s in her arms crying and she can barely breath she’s so happy overjoyed _{like a druggie nympho china doll} that it doesn’t even matter that the man doesn’t smile at the projects, he’s smiling now at the little bundle in her arms, holding his out. He still frowns at her, but she’s made him something to smile for _{a flower for her knight} and maybe now he’ll be better.

Time escapes and she’s in a hallway, the bundle back in her arms. He’s here, opposite her _{you belong on my side} holding his arms out again for her for the girl for her baby for her only smile _{all for you} and suddenly she can’t breathe again but now she’s just scared. He wants to go home, but he wants her, he wants the smiles for himself, and she yells at the man, her muse, her captive, yells at him to leave her, to go away. She is angry for the first real time _{rage is white-hot} ever _{and it hurts} and it hurts to watch him leave but she smiles at the bundle in her arms, and it smiles back.

“I’ll name you Nina,” she says and she does and the bundle grows into a beautiful bouquet of smiles and cabbages and _{I love you more than I can ever say} time disappears _runs away slips through her fingers and for once she is sad to see the time gone, wanting every second for herself, every last second of her smiles to hold onto.