Back when I was in college, I met a girl named Autumn. She was the most beautiful girl I've ever met.
It was my first year at the university, and she was a senior at the local Catholic high school, about a mile away from the campus. Per regulations, she had to wear the classic uniform, plaid skirt to her knees, white blouse, blazer, and so on like all of the other girls there.
Even though this was an all-girls school, her beauty was striking. She liked to wear her hair in pigtails, but her hair was so long that each braid fell down her back to her waist. She said she liked the feeling of them better that way because she could swing them around better when she felt like it. At 18, her figure was fully developed.
She also had one of the sweetest voices I've ever heard; honey sweet and slightly smoky. I could listen to her for hours and never grow tired of it. I heard her sing solo once in one of the Catholic masses she attended through school, and her voice was so ethereal and sweet I swear Saint Peter himself would have sat up sharply and taken notice.
In addition to being both beautiful and brilliant, she was also one of the most erotically sensuous girls I've ever met. She knew how innocent she looked in her plaid skirt and long braids, so she would sometimes go to school wearing no panties so she could "feel the rough material of the skirt rubbing against her naked ass as she walked" and "the cool wind caressing her hot pussy". Her words, not mine.
I don't mean that she was promiscuous, in many ways she was still an innocent. She was still a virgin at the time, and as things turned out, we were each other's first. I thought at the time when she said these things, that she was just trying to shock me and see how I reacted. Not till much later did I find out that it was both, she did want to see how I reacted, and that it was true. She said she liked the thrill of thinking how the nuns would faint dead away if they knew she was stark naked beneath her skirt while singing in the choir during mass.
The thing is, I am totally blind, having lost my sight in an injury when I was in my teens. So, at the time when I met Autumn, I had no idea she was the most beautiful and sensuous girl I would ever meet; I only found these things out later.
Being blind, there is a lot that goes into schooling, one of which is obtaining accessible reading materials like text books. Nowadays these can usually be found in electronic format, but back then, they were mostly still in print. So, through Disabled Services, readers would volunteer to read text books for students at the university. Sometimes this would be other students at the college, or volunteers from the local Catholic school would do so instead since both institutions were loosely affiliated.
This is how I met Autumn, she had volunteered to read one of my textbooks. My first thought upon hearing this news was, that's really nice of her, Autumn is a really pretty name. My first thought upon hearing her speak though was, she has the most beautiful voice I've ever heard, how the hell am I going to pay attention to anything she's saying. Thus, Autumn and I were introduced.
Months went by though, and we both got into the rhythm of things. She was an immense help, but I never lost my attraction to her voice; it just settled deeper as we became friends. She also noticed that sometimes I would be listening to her, but not always remember what she had been reading at the time. She asked me if this was because of the injury where I had lost my sight. So, I somewhat embarrassingly admitted that, no, it was because her voice was so pretty that I had trouble concentrating sometimes on what she was saying. She was quiet for a moment, then asked me about something else to change the subject. I was afraid that I had offended her by admitting this to her, but she still seemed to be okay, so I tried to put it out of my mind. I only found out much later that she thought this was one of the sweetest things anybody had ever said to her.
One important thing about being blind is, initial attraction isn't physical, it's always auditory. Having lost my sight in my teens, I had been fully sighted before, so I knew from purloined Playboys and the like what women looked like naked, and what I was most attracted to. So, I didn't know what Autumn looked like physically, just that I was powerfully attracted to her, based on the sweetness of her voice, plus her kindness and intelligence.
We started spending more time together, and she got into the habit of describing things to me. These started out as small things as we were out together. She would comment about something she saw like "that's weird", then I would enquire what about, and she would describe it. As time went on, she became increasingly better at it. I remember one night when she described the moon and stars for me, and how the clouds looked scudding across the sky. She did it so well that I could see all of it in my mind, even though I couldn't do so physically.
This was totally amazing. For a blind person who was previously sighted, all of the original points of reference remain. When somebody said airplane for example, I pictured what I remembered an airplane looking like when I could see, which didn't match the airplane being referenced in the present. Instead, Autumn opened a door in my mind that I thought was closed forever, and that by itself was truly magical.
I discovered that she enjoyed describing things to me just as much as I enjoyed hearing her do it. As part of her own studies, she was learning about the arts, and she started describing these to me as well, which was fascinating. She started out with many of the well-known pieces such as the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the Persistence of Memory by Salvador DalÃ, David by Michelangelo, and many others. At the same time, she started sprinkling in the erotics as well, such as The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez, the portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs, and even the sexually incongruous, such as Monument to Balzac by Rodin and the statue of Hercules and Diomedes in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. She loved describing that last one, God how she laughed; we both did.
By this point, she had become such an important part of my life that I couldn't bear the thought of doing anything to jeopardize that. I remember thinking of her as I lay awake at night, longing for her so badly that I thought the ache in my heart would kill me. That's when I realized that I loved her. I've felt many types of pain over the course of my life, starting with the injury when I was scarred and broken, but the pain that is felt when you truly love somebody but don't know if they feel the same for you, is like no other. I didn't know what to do, and I was so afraid of doing the wrong thing.
A huge problem for me was that I had built up many emotional defenses over the years, which was a necessity. Due to the nature of my injury, I was scarred everywhere, my face, my head, my neck, my arms, my legs, my stomach, and so on. When I say I was broken, that is literally true. So much of the time that it took for me to heal and grow stronger was during the years that I was in high school. Needless to say, I was forced to build exceptionally strong emotional defenses. Outwardly to others this appeared as a form of stoicism, where I rarely spoke to anyone. I found out later that many saw this as arrogance, which couldn't have been further from the truth. I was just trying not to be noticed by anyone.
At one point, when I was experiencing a moment of weakness and self-doubt, I asked Autumn if my appearance was difficult for her. I immediately regretted it, fearing her answer, but she was starting to mean so much to me that I needed to know the truth; even if it hurt me. She was quiet for a moment, then she said no. A few awkward heartbeats went by, and I thought that was the end of it.
Then she said, actually, she liked my scars. She said she admired me because I had obviously experienced things none of the other guys she knew could even imagine enduring in their worst nightmares, and that somehow, I made myself stronger because of it.
My eyes were burning, and I couldn't speak for a bit; I kept trying to swallow past the lump in my throat. That was the sweetest thing any girl has ever said to me, and if she had asked me for the moon, I would have found a way to fetch it for her. Years later, the two of us attended a local theater production of Beauty and the Beast, and the irony was not lost on me.
A couple of weeks later, she was telling me about the Christmas Ball at her school, and that this was one of the few events that guys were allowed to take part in on campus. Then it occurred to me that she was asking if I would like to go as her partner. So, I said yes, of course; I would have done anything for her by then, and I'm sure she knew it. I was a bit nervous though, because I had never gone to a dance before. When I was in high school, for obvious reasons, this was just never in the cards for me.
She helped me out though, and the two of us went shopping one day, and she helped me pick out a black silk button down shirt, black slacks, and a dark red tie that she liked the look of. She said her dress would be dark red too, so we would look good together.
When the day came, we met at the dorm; she said I looked great, and I said I was certain she did too. Luckily, she knew how to knot a tie, which she helped me with, then we were off.
By this time, I had a fairly vague idea what her body type was, just from daily contact. I knew she was about a foot shorter than me from the direction of her voice, that her hair was long because I sometimes felt it blow against my arm when we were out together, and that she had a slender build from us going sighted guide together.
If you are unfamiliar with this term, sighted guide is when a sighted person guides a blind person through touch.
With my left hand I would hold Autumn's right arm just above her elbow. This is how I knew she had a slender frame. My hand would wrap all the way around it so that my thumb and middle finger touched. This is relative though, because my hands are fairly large. When I could see I used to play basketball and could grip it one handed from the top without it falling. I was also about six feet tall, and my shoulders were slightly wider than average; with long arms, having hit a growth spurt when I was fifteen, where I grew about a foot.
