There's a girl with broken eyes.

I see her, sometimes. She likes to walk in the park on cool days, wrapped up in so many layers that I feel warm looking at her, which is strange because I never feel warm.

She has very strange hair, and it's stranger because it is always changing. In the beginning it was brown, brown with white streaks that framed her face and reflected inside her broken eyes.

She used to try and dye the white streaks, but it never lasted for long. One week it would be red, another week black--I think she hated the way her hair looked.

Last week I came to the park and she was sitting there, under her tree that all of the homeless people know to avoid. It's her tree, and hers alone, and I think we're all a little afraid of her because no matter how bad our lives are, our eyes aren't broken like hers.

Last week was different, though. She had a knife, and we all stayed even farther away than usual. It was sharp, and the sun was just high enough in the west so that her knife caught the light, and we could see the flashing. The woman who sleeps at the bench next to mine thought she was going to kill herself, but I knew better. Her eyes were broken, but they weren't dead.

She wears gloves, the girl with the broken eyes. She wears gloves and sometimes a scarf and hat, and maybe the reason we all think of her eyes is because that's the only part of her we really get to see.

She wears gloves, and last week the gloved fingers were wrapped around the handle of the sharp, sharp knife that glinted in the sunlight. And as we watched, she wrapped her hand around her hair and started sawing it off.

It fell in clumps, and the grass was still green enough that it looked strange, having long brown locks spread out against the ground. She didn't touch the white streaks though, and she looked strange with her hair uneven around her ears and two, long streaks of white falling around her chest.

She sat there for a long time, the knife in her hand and her hair laying in clumps around her feet. She sat there and stared at the water, but anyone who dared get close enough could see that her eyes saw nothing.

There's a man with a broken heart who follows her around sometimes, and even though I know she sees him, she never acknowledges that he is there. Sometimes he will clasp her hand and we watch how gentle he is with her as he leads her away.

Even when she looks at him, she doesn't seem to know his name. I saw her once, asking him who he was. Her large broken eyes were confused, and his were almost dead as he tried to force a smile, running a rough hand over her hair and whispering words that none of us could hear.

He was there last week, coming into the park just as the knife fell to her lap, and I saw his heart break. He dropped to his knees and his hands wrapped around her wrists and pulled the knife away.

His fingers slid across her cheek, and she jerked away as she always did, and I saw his heart break a little more. The girl with the broken eyes did not like to be touched, but the man with the broken heart did it anyways. And last week I was close enough so that I finally heard the words he whispered as his hands ghosted over the ruins of her hair.

"It's okay, Marie. You know you can't hurt me anymore. It's okay. It doesn't work, Marie. It doesn't work anymore and you know you can touch me. It's okay."

She smiled her vacant smile as his hands slid around her hair but her eyes grew frightened when his fingers touched her face and he sighed and stood up, and I thought I could hear his heart break a little more.

He knelt again, rough hands gathering the hair she'd sliced away from herself, and I watched him tuck it away in his jacket, his bare fingers caressing the hair that was brown no matter how hard she tried to change it.

"I'm tired, Charles. Tell me that they'll never hurt me again."

His shoulders were stiff and his eyes were misty, but he reached forward and touched her hair softly. "They'll never hurt you again, Eric."

I didn't think her name was Eric, but she smiled and nodded and leaned trustingly against the soft denim of the man's jacket, and her face looked peaceful. "I love you, Charles."

"Logan," he whispered, and I don't think she heard him but I did. "I'm Logan, darling."

She didn't act like she heard him, so the man with the broken heart pulled her slowly to her feet and started to lead her away. She paused, for a moment, and then she broke away and walked towards me.

He looked at me, and he didn't look like a man with a broken heart. He looked angry, and dangerous, and suddenly I wished that I hadn't gotten so close in my curiosity over the girl with the broken eyes.

"I want you to have this," she said when she got close enough to me, and she reached out. The knife was in her hand, the sharp knife that glinted softly in the sunlight, and I was too numb to refuse as she curled my fingers tightly around the handle.

She smiled, and leaned forwards to kiss me softly on the lips, and I suddenly felt awkward and too large and too dirty for such a clean, beautiful young girl to touch.

The man with the broken heart growled softly and gathered her up with one hand, but even though he glared at me, he didn't make any move to take the knife back.

They left, the girl with the broken eyes and the man with the broken heart. The left the park and left me with a knife in my dirty, tired hands. A knife worth more than I'd seen in years, but I didn't want to sell it, because it belonged to her.

Her name was not Eric, but Rogue. I found it on the handle, engraved so lightly that I missed it at first. I traced my fingers over the letters and wondered, wondered about a girl named Rogue who thought she was a man named Eric, and a man named Logan who sometimes pretended to be a man named Charles.

Last week she stopped coming to the park, and I wonder sometimes--I wonder where she went.